François Matarasso

Blog

arestlessart.com/

Profile

arestlessart.com/author/regula

Homepage

regularmarvels.wordpress.com

  • Guest blog: Art as vaccination against the Covid misery

    Tony Stacey is Chief Executive of South Yorkshire Housing Association, which provides over 4,000 homes in Sheffield and the wider region. He’s also one of my oldest friends, so we’ve often talked about how SYHA uses participatory art activities in a people-centred service that embraces decent housing, social care, living well and reducing climate impact. When…

  • New year, new projects…

    Today, the first of A Culture of Possibility podcast series is available in the usual places. As I explained earlier, this is a journey I’m starting with Arlene Goldbard, during which we’ll share ideas and experiences about art, community, social action and similar issues. If that sounds vague, it’s partly because we’re not sure where this will…

  • 250 and counting

    Awareness of mental well-being has improved greatly during my lifetime, but there’s still a long way to go before people living with mental difficulties are treated like others in need of care. Partly, perhaps, it’s because mental illness is often experienced by degrees, changeable in its internal and external effects. Like other illnesses, it may…

  • A culture of possibility

    Hope is a contraband Given how things are right now, it feels a bit uncomfortable (and late) to wish readers a Happy New Year, but rituals matter and traditions help keep us afloat in the floods of history. In any case, as we face ecological crisis, pandemic and collapsing political and cultural norms, it seems…

  • Take pride

    In October, I wrote about a community opera being created in County Durham that had been stopped just weeks before its première by the Covid pandemic. The piece had taken more than a year to make in a partnership between professional and non-professional artists and no one was willing to let it go, or wait…

  • Guest blog – Evaluating arts programmes in health care

    Many people have written about evaluating the outcomes of participation in the arts, especially in the past 20 years as funders have been more willing to support the work – if the results they want can be achieved. Most of that writing is by academics and specialists in evaluation but we don’t hear so often…