François Matarasso

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  • 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.…

  • Traction – an EU research project

    An article by Emanuela Barbiroglio published in Horizon, The EU Research and Innovation Magazine,10 August 2022 A prison opera and digital transformation boost diversity of artistic voices Four professional Portuguese singers performed the main roles in a new opera based on Homer’s “Odyssey” at a packed concert hall in Portugal’s capital Lisbon in mid-June. Also on…

  • Virtual Realities, Part One

    Early in 2020, Irish National Opera (INO) began work on an unusual community project—a new VR opera, co-created with people from three different parts of Ireland: teenagers living in rural areas, adults from Tallaght, on the edge of Dublin, and Irish-speakers and other residents of Inis Meáin, an island off the coast of Galway. Geographical and cultural…