François Matarasso

A hopeful return

My dear friend Arlene Goldbard and I have been recording a monthly podcast for over three years now, though I have had to take two longish breaks, most recently over this winter. Fortunately, my role is secondary: Arlene manages things perfectly, writing up each episodes from New Mexico, while Owen Kelly turns recordings into distributable…

Regeneration

After eight months unable to work—the longest caesura of my life—I feel the process of transformation beginning to fulfil its purpose. Thought and energy become fluid again, like mercury. Synapses start to fire. Possibilities reveal themselves.

And she was quite right

‘Bang, you’re dead!’ we said. ‘I got you!’ we said. When we played, it was always war. A bunch of us together, one-on-one, or in solitary fantasies – always war, always death. ‘Don’t play like that,’ our parents said, ‘you could grow up that way.’ Some threat – there was no way we would rather…

Speaking of the master’s house

I’m ambivalent about public speaking, though I’ve been doing it for so long. It’s best when the speaker knows they’re involved in a performance art, in which what is said is generally less important than how. I’ve heard talks by Arthur Miller and Edward de Bono of which I remember not a word or an…

Easter eggs

In the early days of personal computing, software engineers amused themselves by hiding messages or unsuspected features into their programmes. What began as jokes between peers became a way to reward loyal users with additional value. These virtual prizes came to be known as easter eggs, after the tradition of hiding chocolate treats for small children…

The meaning of participation (isn’t what I thought it was)

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…