Co-creation as if people mattered
A Restless Art describes the history, theory and practice of community art. Published in 2019, the book is free to download, along with case studies and other resources.
A Selfless Art is a companion to that book, correcting and rebalancing, more personal and reflective; I do not know if it will be completed.
Elsewhere on this site you can find the books in the Regular Marvels series, reports, essays, and other writing. There are also documents on the early history of the community arts movement in Britain.
My other work includes a European project on opera co-creation, publications on culture and international development and community heritage. The podcast about cultural democracy that I co-host with Arlene Goldbard is here.
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Every three years, the International Community Arts Festival comes together for five days in Rotterdam (NL). Making it happen is a magnificent achievement by a very small team who have…
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It’s very common to hear people say that they are passionate about the arts, or that passion drives their work, but the word has always worried me. I understood why…
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Last autumn, I started a website called A Selfless Art to document the book I’ve been working on since 2023. I saw it as a space to test ideas but…
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“We’re just growing these AIs. They’re huge. We have no idea how they work. And that is a very difficult situation in which to try to do something as precise…
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‘Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive…
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Exactly forty years ago, on 13 November 1985, the eruption of Nevado del Ruiz in the Colombian Andes produced one of the worst volcanic events in centuries. Lava and mudflows…
François Matarasso 