François Matarasso

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  • Trusting each other

    On Sunday, I cut short a trip to the Forest of Imagination to get home and vote in France’s early parliamentary elections. The day after tomorrow, the UK will go to the polls in a vote that could permanently change the country’s political landscape, and three days later the second round of the French elections might bring…

  • Thinking about privilege, freedom and justice

    Objectively speaking, I have had a privileged life. I was taught to be aware of that from early childhood, and I have not forgotten the lesson, even if my grasp of its meaning has grown with my knowledge of the world. But what does it mean to be privileged and, which is also important, what…

  • There is a place for love

    Can art be separate from war and suffering? Not until human beings find the courage to live together in peace. But there is usually a large and comforting distance between those of us who spend our lives creating art and the places where people kill and suffer. It was moving to watch Camille Cottin open…

  • ‘Not permanent, not universal, not necessary.’

    We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art: the art of words. Ursula K Le Guin, speaking at the National Book Awards, 2014 In 2014,…

  • Writing a manifesto is no reason not to change your mind

    I’ve never been keen on manifestos, political, religious or artistic, and especially not  those associated with modernism – too much certainty, too much rhetoric, too much damned ego. Even allowing for youth’s frustration with the past, I can’t read Marinetti’s proto-Fascist Futurist fantasies without an overwhelming sense of their stupidity. Just two of his manifesto’s 11…

  • The negative capabilities of a community artist

    It’s a sign of how rich and complex is the practice of co-creation that I still find myself learning about the nature of my role as a community artist after so many decades. In the Traction project, I worked with people who have enormous expertise in music, theatre, visual art, design and technology but, with…