• Learning the right lessons

    Ten days ago, at home in France, I watched a live stream of a performance happening in Portugal. Nós. Vocês. Toda a gente. (Us. You Guys. Everyone.) was the first sight of the opera being co-created by inmates and staff at Leiria Youth Prison, with their families and the professional musicians and educators of SAMP. People…

  • Using digital technology in co-creation workshops

    The clue’s in the name: participatory art happens when people get to participate. The closure of cinemas, theatres and music venues is a very visible effect of the pandemic. The suspension of community art and co-creation workshops has received little attention, but it has affected many of the most vulnerable people in society. For some,…

  • ‘Wish You Were Here’ – coming summer 2021

    There’s no moment quite like this. So much of community art is in the journey, the being-together, listening, learning and discovering—and all that is full of wonders too, but it is made meaningful when art comes into being from that shared process: its product, validation and marker. Art that goes out into the world, to…

  • Going on about ethics

    In the past 20 years, as participation has come in from the margins, both the artworld and academia have written a lot about art practice with people. I’ve read little of that steadily-accumulating library, partly due to barriers of access, cost and language, but also because it rarely nourishes my thinking. Some of it is…

  • ‘What I’ve Been Looking For’

    The Musicals Choir was started by Cristina Colomer, director of the Escola de Músics in Raval, for young people experiencing difficulties in school. In four years, it has grown to include about 60 singers, all lovers of songs from the musicals. Last night, they welcomed a small group of Traction project members to their weekly…

  • Funding community arts – a new episode of ‘A Culture of Possibility’ podcast

    In the fourth episode of our monthly podcast Arlene Goldbard and I talk about how community art is funded in Europe and in the USA, and the often wrong-headed and inequitable assumptions on which money is granted (or not). You can read Arlene’s reflections on our discussion below. The episode is available from 12:34 UTC…