François Matarasso

Yesterday, I had a little exchange with a friend about how to support community artists. She wasn’t talking about money or management, important as those things are, but about nourishing the inner sources of people’s creativity, energy and humanity. We’re a similar age and she has spent her life co-creating art, especially with disabled people. The issue of support is one we’ve both thought and talked about many times over the years, in conferences, meetings and pubs. We’ve been part of support networks and associations, most of them short-lived because there was barely enough to do the work itself. We’ve contributed to discussions about training, peer learning and mentoring, and carried our share of the burden of mutuality too.

Decades on, community artists still work in fragile situations, their commitment taken for granted, even exploited by the art world’s more powerful divisions. From one perspective, this is critical to the future of co-creation. Without decent working conditions and the time and care to look after their own lives, community artists will always be the art world’s Cinderellas.

But as I thought about my conversation with Geraldine, I also saw how good we are at doing this for ourselves, without help or permission. The time we spent together yesterday—planning a new project, sharing ideas and catching up with the joys and griefs in each other’s lives—was the essence of mutual support or, to describe it more simply, of friendship.

And it’s friendship more than anything that has sustained, enriched and rewarded me over the decades in community art. It’s in friendship that I have learned and shared what I know, that I have laughed and known joy, that I have consoled and been consoled. It’s in friendship that I have grown and given my hand to others. And it’s the friends I remember.

The art we made, the projects we organised, the challenges resolved—they have faded with the passing years. But my heart is joyously crowded with people who have given me their friendship and who will be with me as long as I am me. Some of them I worked with for a few days or weeks: others I have known more than half my life. Knowing them has been an education in love—and in the courage to speak of love in the desiccated world of arts administration.

At the top of this post is a photo of Oriol and Irene, two of the friends I made working on La Gata Perduda at the Liceu Opera House in Barcelona. Oriol is an artist who worked on the poster designs, and we’ve only met three or four times; Irene was my principal colleague at the theatre, with whom I worked on a daily basis. The photo was taken when Irene took Oriol a copy of the Co-creating Opera book that I dedicated to him as a thank you for his portrait of me.

Nothing I have done in community art means more to me than these human connections. People are the end: art is only ever the means.