François Matarasso

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  • Talking about culture, philanthropy and democracy (ADESTE+)

    ADESTE+ is a European project dedicated to increasing cultural participation, supported by the EU’s Creative Europe funding. With 15 partners from the UK, Italy, Spain, Poland, Croatia, Portugal and Denmark, they hope to ‘encourage audience-centric cultural organizations across Europe’ through sharing knowledge and good practice. This year, their annual conference is online, in a series of weekly sessions…

  • Talking with Northern Heartlands

    In February, I spent a couple of days in County Durham, meeting artists and local people involved in the Northern Heartlands Great Places Scheme. They’d asked me to speak at an event marking the completion of three years’ work and the project’s transition into a new form. I went to learn about what people have…

  • Which murals are worth saving?

    Murals were a cornerstone of the early community art movement. Between the 1960s and 1990s, hundreds were painted, mostly outdoors, and some – like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in Battersea, the Easterhouse Mosaic in Glasgow, or The Battle of Cable Street in Shadwell – became well-known as symbols of political ideas and…

  • Community opera in a pandemic

    In February, I participated in the kick-off meeting of TRACTION, a Horizon 2020 project researching how digital technology can support community opera as a factor in social inclusion. About 30 of us travelled to San Sebastián from Dublin, Barcelona, Leiria, Amsterdam and Nottingham. It was the first, and so far, the only time we have…

  • Art for social change – or social justice?

    In 1990s Britain the term community art began to be replaced by participatory arts, which many people hoped didn’t carry ‘the baggage of the past’. On one level that was just part of the generational renewal through which artists try to escape the weight of their history, but it also had specific theoretical, political and artistic reasons and…

  • Clinging on in a tsunami: the arts and mental health

    Since the beginning of 2020, the Baring Foundation has focused its arts support on the needs of people with metal health problems, after a decade of prioritising arts and older people. People in both groups – which of course are not mutually exclusive – have been deeply affected by the public health measures taken to combat the…