François Matarasso

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  • 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,…

  • Missing the movement

    One of the most read pages on this site is A (very short) history of the British community arts movement. Perhaps it comes up if you search for the history of community art. I wrote it years ago and couldn’t remember what I’d said, so I re-read it today to check up on myself.  Overall, I thought…

  • Different paths to similar destinations

    Veuillez faire défiler vers le bas pour lire le texte en français. Claire Angelini is a French artist whose work is preoccupied with the troubling presence of the past in the present, and particularly with systems of historic and contemporary oppression. Through drawing, film, photography and installation, she has excavated the remains of sites implicated in…

  • From ‘Us & Them’ to We

    Academic publishing takes time, but life moves more quickly. Yesterday, I received a copy of a book of articles from a conference about music mediation to I spoke at in June 2023—before the Gaza war, before the second Trump presidency, before so much… The chapter I re-wrote from my talk seems from another world. It…

  • Making peace with the past

    This post was first published on A Selfless Art; you can subscribe there for updates on my thinking and the book. For a writer (or an artist of any kind) there’s only one thing worse than being unknown and that is being known for one book (or song, or film, or image). An outstanding success…