This essay was written a couple of years ago, at the invitation of Onassis Stegi in Athens, for a collection called The Handbook of Cultural Work(Bloomsbury 2024). It sets out my thinking as I worked on the 2020 Rome Charter and Traction, and sought to link the Capabilities Approach with cultural policy. Reading it today, it’s a fair summary of where I was in spring 2022, but it also shows me how far my ideas have continued to evolve. This now reads like a last letter from a land I’ve left behind. It remains to be seen whether the new one I’m heading for with A Selfless Art is more than a mirage.
In the meantime, you can read that last letter below, and download the whole book from this link
- The Handbook of Cultural Work (Bloomsbury 2024)
The Meaning of Participation
Rights are the claim that we must ask of any social process or power relationship: Who counts as human? What is right? And who is responsible?
Brysk, 2018: 9
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) was imagined, drafted and adopted in a little over two years. It was a response to the unprecedented trauma of the Second World War, which had caused tens of millions of civilian deaths and shattered confidence in old ideas of human values and civilisation. In thirty brief articles, this visionary document set out a novel concept of human rights: individual, universal and inalienable (This is an unavoidable simplification of a document that reflects the time and circumstances of its creation: for an account of the philosophical complexities and compromises involved see Moyn 2010). Its power is moral, though, not legal. The fulfilment of the Declaration’s promises, which it would be generous to describe as uneven, has depended on a series of covenants, conventions and charters agreed by states, also unevenly, in the subsequent decades. Enforcement has often been impossible, while the text’s cultural and ideological biases have been contested and used to justify non-compliance.
Despite these weaknesses, the Declaration is a vital standard and an inspiration to many whose lives and freedoms are constrained by power. In seeing human rights as distinct from citizenship or law (though influencing the operation of both) the Declaration asserts a compelling idea of human equality. It does not only concern nation states. It speaks to everyone and empowers civil society organizations and even individuals to challenge refractory governments in court. Legal battles make news, and preoccupy lawyers and politicians, but the UDHR has an equally important but less obvious power to motivate people to turn its ideals into lived reality through their own actions. This has certainly been true of Article 27.1, which states:
Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The idea that culture is a human right might surprise those who consider it – and especially art – an inconsequential dimension of public policy, but its inclusion in the UDHR is a mark of the Drafting Committee’s imagination (as well as its predispositions).
Culture is how human beings define and express their values, how they create and share meaning. It is also how their different beliefs are communicated, tolerated and contested, sometimes violently (it has been invoked by both nations in the Russian invasion of Ukraine). Culture is expressed in the everyday activities through which people meet their basic needs. We all have to eat, dress and take shelter: the immense variety of ways in which we do those things is culture, and we invest its specificities with meanings that we often believe to be of the first importance. But culture extends much further, indeed, it touches every aspect of human life, from entertainment to religion. Art, in the influential concept developed during the European Enlightenment, is another expression of culture, one of whose distinctive qualities is to encourage a questioning, self-critical perspective on culture itself. That is why, whatever their actual reasoning for doing so, the Drafting Committee were wise to include culture in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The right to participate in the cultural life of the community – and therefore to hold and publicly express cultural values, beliefs and identities – is intrinsic to being human. The denial of that right, to Jews, Roma and other minorities in the 1930s, to Uighurs, Rohingya and gay people today (to take only the most notorious examples), is the first step to denying people other human rights. The right to culture is a cornerstone of contemporary human rights architecture and its removal should always raise alarm.
But this right, like others set out in the Declaration, is unevenly protected. Even in stable democratic nations, a range of economic, social, political and even cultural barriers prevent many people from participating in the cultural life of the community. At best, they are observers and consumers of a culture created and controlled by others, notably the powerful who shape the arts, media, education, religion and all the other fields in which a community’s culture is articulated. Following the emergence of industrial societies in the early nineteenth century, many of those who felt excluded from culture acted to gain access to its empowering resources. Working people established institutes, libraries and associations to support their intellectual and cultural development, contributing to the rise of capable and articulate labour movements that improved the lives of millions (Rose 2010). In doing so, they adopted ideas of self-improvement that had been part of the idea of culture since the classical period (Belfiore & Bennett 2008). But after the Second World War, the UDHR offered a new rationale for access to culture: human rights. This contributed to the policies of cultural democratisation implemented by both social democratic and communist welfare states, and the huge expansion of publicly funded theatres, museums, galleries and libraries in post- war Europe. It also energized the competing idea of cultural democracy that emerged in the 1960s and sought to replace what it saw as a static and paternalistic model with a dynamic approach that valued the diversity of cultures and forms of expression in contemporary society as a factor in democracy itself. In this second model, participation in the cultural life of the community was an active experience: culture not for the people, but with them and by them.
Unfortunately, although Article 27.1 of the UDHR establishes the principle that every- one has a right to participate in the cultural life of the community, it is not easy to interpret that in practice, hence the continuing tension between cultural democratisation and cultural democracy, and other weaknesses in cultural policy of democratic governments. Although there are unavoidable ambiguities in the Declaration, terms such as ‘death penalty’, ‘torture’ or ‘slavery’ are clear. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine any government accepting that it prevents citizens from exercising their right to participate in cultural life, though there is little common ground between the realities of cultural participation in China, Italy, Mali, India or the United States.
In 2020, the umbrella body, United Cities and Local Governments, worked with the City of Rome to find an answer to this problem, through a new rationale for the right to cultural participation expressed in the form of a charter. I was invited to help draft the text, with experts and local politicians from across the world in a series of online meetings, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The 2020 Rome Charter was presented at the UCLG World Council in November that year.
In seeking to define what cultural participation might mean, the document deliberately avoids defining culture, except in the broad sense proposed above. It says:
Culture is the expression of values, a common, renewable resource in which we meet one another, learn what can unite us and how to engage with differences in a shared space. Those differences exist within and between cultures. They must be acknowledged and engaged with. An inclusive, democratic, sustainable city enables that process, and is strengthened by it too. Culture is the creative workshop with which citizens can imagine responses to our common challenges. Sometimes it is a solution, sometimes it is how we discover other solutions.
The 2020 Rome Charter
To say that culture expresses values, and that those values are different and sometimes contested, is both to recognise reality and to protect the acceptability of the Charter. More important, in the present context, was the Charter’s use of the Capability Approach, developed by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum and others, to establish a consistent meaning to the idea of participation in cultural life. Until now, the Capability Approach has been used principally in economics and development, and the 2020 Rome Charter may be its first application in cultural policy. Nussbaum describes capabilities as ‘the answers to the question, “What is this person able to do and to be?”’ (Nussbaum, 2011: 20). But those answers are not determined only by personal abilities. Nussbaum continues:
They are not just abilities residing inside a person but also the freedoms or opportunities created by a combination of personal abilities and the political, social, and economic environment.
(Nussbaum, 2011: 20)
Sen and Nussbaum call this an ‘approach’ rather than a model because they prioritise individual autonomy expressed through choice, and the freedom of judgement that implies. In Sen’s words, the Capability Approach gives a central role to:
The evaluation of a person’s achievements and freedoms in terms of his or her actual ability to do the different things a person has reason to value doing or being.
(In Robeyns, 2017: 18)
In respecting a person’s judgement about what they value doing or being, the Capability Approach is aligned with a concept of culture as the expression of values (personal or communal) rather than a value in its own right (though that has been a common belief since the Enlightenment). Culture is, in this sense, what people care about. Connecting these two ideas leads to the conclusion that individuals are the best judges of what participation in the cultural life of the community means to them.
But this does not imply a simple laissez-faire approach to cultural policy. Respecting citizens’ judgement does not absolve cultural institutions, local authorities or governments in democratic states that respect human rights from the responsibility to establish a ‘political, social, and economic environment’ that enables people to exercise their freedom to be and to do what they wish, in culture, or indeed in any other aspect of their lives. A wish to attend school is the clearly expressed judgement of millions of Afghan girls, which the Taliban government currently denies them (BBC, 2022). The 2020 Rome Charter therefore defines five capabilities that public bodies should ensure that people have – the right to discover, enjoy, create, share and protect culture. If citizens can do these things, in whatever ways they have ‘reason to value’, then it can be said that they are indeed able to exercise their right to participate in the cultural life of the community.
This is a new approach to thinking about cultural participation. It is rooted in cultural democracy, but provides a firmer basis for that policy than has yet been established. It does so, moreover, in language and concepts that are designed to be understandable by everyone. Each person can determine whether they can freely discover, enjoy, create, share and protect their culture. It rejects the sometimes condescending ideas and practices that underpin the access initiatives of public cultural institutions, which tend to assess their success according to whether they either improved a person’s appreciation of elite art or their social situation as defined by the institution, rather than the person concerned. The approach set out in the 2020 Rome Charter simply defines capabilities that people have a right to exercise, leaving assessments of performance and success to them. In principle, it seems clearly preferable. But how useful is it in practice?
The answer to that should become clearer through Traction’s research into the potential of opera co-creation as a route towards social inclusion. The Traction project (2020–2) is funded through the EU Horizon 2020 research programme and centres on three operas co-created using new digital tools by professional and non-professional artists in Portugal, Ireland and Spain. The first involves a community music school in Leiria and the inmates of a local youth prison; in the second, Irish National Opera is creating a virtual reality opera with community groups in different parts of Ireland. The largest and most ambitious project involves the Liceu theatre in Barcelona, a traditional opera house that celebrated its 175th anniversary in 2022.
With a capacity of almost 2,300, the Liceu is the biggest such auditorium in Europe, a gilded palace of red velvet that has welcomed the elite of Catalan society for decades. Its main entrance is on La Rambla, the city’s famous tree-lined route from the centre to the sea, and a focus of contemporary tourism. The rear of the building gives onto el Raval, a neighbourhood characterized by huge social, cultural and economic diversity, where 47,000 people live in just over one square kilometre of densely packed buildings. Almost half of them were not born in the EU, and Arabic, Bengali, Tagalog and Urdu are as commonly spoken as Spanish or Catalan. Raval has a poor image in the media, which often focuses on crime, drugs and prostitution, but it has a dynamic and tightly knit social fabric with many NGOs, community groups and cultural venues, including four independent music schools and a dozen amateur choirs. Despite their close proximity, there has been little contact between these two communities, who might be seen to represent different ends of social life in Barcelona.
In 2018, as part of a long-term project to redefine the opera house as a cultural space for all, the Liceu began ‘Opera Prima Raval’ to create a new work with the people of Raval and in the process transform the relationship between them. The playwright Victoria Szpunberg drew on interviews with local people to create a fictional story about the neighbourhood’s spirit of community action and resistance. Her libretto, La Gata Perduda (‘The Lost Cat’), then formed the basis of a five act opera composed by Arnaud Tordera, a popular Catalan musician. Raval’s input to this work was necessarily limited by the artistic and technical demands of musical composition, but hundreds of residents are contributing to the process of bringing it to the stage.
From the outset, the Liceu sought to pair its production process with partners in the neighbourhood, so it made contact not only with community music groups but also with social organizations skilled in clothing, construction, carpentry, graphic design and other crafts associated with theatre. As a result, the costumes for the opera were created in partnership with Dona Kolors, a fashion brand that supports vulnerable women, and Top Manta, a collective of migrant workers who produce new street clothing. The construction of the stage set involved a local training workshop, Impulsem, and graffiti artists from the neighbourhood who created the floor design. Even the posters for the opera were created by students from the Massana design school and disabled creatives at the Sínia Occupational Centre. The production was co-created through a similar partnership with members of twelve different amateur choirs, ranging from Kudyapi, a youth choir of Filipino heritage, to Cor Mon Raval, which involves older residents. A former member of Kudyapi was chosen for one of the principal roles – the lost cat herself – while professional opera singers performed other characters. The orchestra involved student musicians from the Liceu conservatoire. This intensive process, entirely unprecedented for the Liceu, culminated in two performances on the main stage of the opera house in October 2022. It was a genuine co-creation, an inclusive community opera that neither professional nor non-professional artists could have created alone.
‘Opera Prima Raval’ has been a long, slow process, interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic which affected those living in precarious situations especially badly. In Raval, the loss of income from shop and restaurant closures brought great hardship, and thousands depended on the social support of local NGOs and the public administration. The opera was delayed by almost a year, but work continued throughout, with co-creation of the poster designs taking place online during the winter and spring of 2021.
It is not simple to trace the process of Opera Prima Raval or the effects it may have for everyone involved. In fact, it may be years before the outcomes can be properly understood. Traction published its evaluation at the end of 2022, but the postponement of La Gata Perduda makes it very early to reach firm conclusions. That said, it is already possible to ask whether social inclusion was the best concept within which to frame the project. Many Raval residents are indeed at risk of social exclusion (even more since the pandemic) and participating in the opera has opened new opportunities for them. However, the potential of a relatively short cultural project to sustain social change is limited, at least when compared to the work of permanent social entities such as Dona Kolors, Top Manta and Impulsem, or even the amateur choirs who play an important social function in the lives of their members. A community opera production can contribute to social inclusion and cohesion, but only within a tissue of similar effort and a supportive policy context. Taking part in an opera will not change the basic life circumstances of people confronted by poverty and poor services, and it is unrealistic (at best) to place such expectations on cultural programmes.
But projects like ‘Opera Prima Raval’, and the parallel productions in Portugal and Ireland, do protect people’s human right to participate in the cultural life of the community. In doing so, the early results of evaluation show, they address people’s capabilities by simultaneously strengthening their individual abilities and changing the organizations that have most influence on how those abilities can be used.
One experience from the Portuguese Traction project demonstrates the potential. The opera, O Tempo (Somos Nós) – ‘Time (As We Are)’ – was performed twice at the prison in Leiria where it was co-created by inmates and professional artists, and twice at the Gulbenkian Concert Hall in Lisbon, in June 2022. The 1,200 places for the Lisbon performances were sold out. Among those who attended was Tiago (not his real name), a smartly dressed young black man. He had got a ticket as soon as the performance was announced and travelled several hundred kilometres on his own to be present. Why? He told me as we waited for the performance to begin that he had performed on that stage five years ago, in an earlier iteration of SAMP’s prison opera project, when he had been in the cast of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutti. He was here to support the inmates, some of whom he knew, and to show what the project had meant to him. In prison, he had discovered, created and shared opera, and the experience had given him new capabilities and new choices. His experience was echoed in subsequent interviews by many of the young inmates who performed that night.
It has become common in recent years to consider the social impact of cultural projects, a term that implies a one-sided idea of how such experiences work: they have impact on the groups who are supposed to benefit. But people are not passive recipients of culture, and positive outcomes are indissociable from their agency. The Capability Approach recognizes that lasting change depends on the ways and degree to which people are enabled to fulfil their capabilities by the institutions with which they engage. The changes taking place within the Liceu, and also in social entities such as Dona Kolors, Top Manta and Sínia Occupational Centre, are as important to positive, sustained social development as any benefit individual participants may gain. Tiago’s story is a success because support was available to assist him make good his personal capabilities. The effects of such projects become clear only over time, but there is reason to think that a human rights and capabilities approach can help not only to understand the outcomes of participation in cultural programmes but, perhaps more importantly, how the cultural sector needs to change if it truly intends to play a progressive role in twenty-first-century society.
References
- BBC. (2022). ‘Afghanistan: Taliban Backtrack on Reopening High Schools for Girls’. BBC News.
- Belfiore, E. and Bennett, O. (2008). The Social Impact of the Arts: An Intellectual History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Brysk, A. (2018). The Future of Human Rights. Cambridge; Medford, MA: Polity Press.
- Nussbaum, M. C. (2011). Creating Capabilities the Human Development Approach. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan.
- Robeyns, I. (2017). Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice: The Capability Approach Re-examined. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers.
- Rose, J. (2010). The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press.
- UCLG World Council 2021.
Photos courtesy of SAMP and the Liceu Theatre
François Matarasso 