François Matarasso

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  • The certainty that something makes sense

    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 to raise the money, shape the programme and organise accommodation, food and transport for hundreds of participants. This month, it will happen again for, I…

  • The insufficiency of passion

    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 as I read Against Empathy by the social psychologist Paul Bloom. Writing about the limitations of empathy he argues for the primacy of reason over…

  • On a darkling plain

    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 it is a distraction and a dead end. I’ve closed that site and brought the project back here but I can’t work on the book…

  • I am terrified of AI

    “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 as make them care about us.” Nate Soares, 11 November 2025 For several years now, I’ve been involved in research projects involving digital technology. It’s…

  • Resistance and change often begin in art

    ‘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 technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists…

  • What art can do

    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 poured down the valleys at a speed of 30mph, catching many people unprepared and sheltering in their homes. The earth engulfed the town of Armero,…