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ICAF 2026
In listening to the opening speeches at ICAF 2026, I’m encouraged at a time when courage is more needed than ever. We can help each other and ourselves by working together with creativity and love. May it be so. The opening performance An Fara (It has begun) An Fara is co-created by Mud Art and…
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This shape-shifting border territory
When I am facilitating a co-creation project, how can I ensure that the experience is as rewarding for those present as I hope? That question opens many further questions, which is why this practice is restless and so rewarding to me. Let’s begin with questions about what I know, believe or assume, (by which I mean what I believe I know…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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