François Matarasso

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  • A Culture of Possibility Podcast #25 – Jasmina Ibrahimovic 

    NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 25th episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 20 January 2023. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net’s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many…

  • Old Words #11 – ‘All in this together’

    Still from ‘Ghost Town’ The Specials, 1981 THE DEPOLITICISATION OF COMMUNITY ART IN BRITAIN, 1970-2011 In 2011, I was asked to speak at ICAF about community arts in Britain, after the change of government the year before—and could I also say something about the riots that had taken place that summer? No, I could not:…

  • More carpenters than jackasses

    In this part of Northern Europe, midwinter skies are often bright and clear. The low sun floods in like stage light, giving new shape to familiar land. It’s a precious reminder when the nights are so long, seeming to light the way forward. As the saying goes, if you look towards the light, the shadows…

  • Watch the making of ‘La Gata Perduda’

    Reading about ‘La Gata Perduda‘ in these posts must be a somewhat frustrating experience. After all, it has often been said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture – and in an opera co-created with hundreds of non-professionals, there are many more layers that need to be translated from one idiom to another. Happily, Catalonian…

  • ‘The MIAAW Monthly’, a cultural democracy email

    For the last couple of years, I’ve been doing a podcast with Arlene Goldbard, in which we talk with like-minded people in the USA and Europe about community art and cultural democracy. I tag along really: Arlene is a much more natural speaker than me, while the technical side of is kindly and invisibly managed by Owen…

  • Access ≠ Democracy

    When I began in community art, the photocopier was new technology. In the printshop where I was an apprentice, we couldn’t afford Letraset transfer sheets so we copied and enlarged typefaces from the catalogue and redrew them for screen-printed posters (as in the example below). Our minimal office work was done on a typewriter with carbon copies.…