François Matarasso

New beginnings

Autumn has always seemed a time of new beginnings for me, probably because of the coincidence of the start of the school year with my birthday. In France, it’s called la rentrée, the return or coming home even, as habitual duties are resumed after the long summer holidays. I like the sense of possibility offered…

What will survive of us

Yesterday evening I sat in the village church for a concert of mostly Baroque music – Bach, Telemann, Vivaldi, Rameau among others, arranged for piano, ,trumpet and soprano. The composers had been contemporaries in their day, and sit together well, although their lives were different in many ways. It struck me that they are now…

Creative alchemy: how life becomes art

It’s a cold, functional room, part of the prison’s public face, used variously as chapel, recreation room and, today, a meeting room. About thirty of us have gathered here this morning: people from the Sant Andreu district, the Liceu opera house and Amplify. Ostensibly, we’re here to talk about the community opera being co-created with…

The genesis of ideas

Looking through old files for material that ended up in the post about how my work was influenced by Welfare State I realised one big change in my process: the genesis of ideas. In my early years – my twenties, I suppose – most of the projects I worked on began with an idea of…

Worlds

Each of us is a world, an entire planet of knowledge, ideas and experience, accumulated painstakingly from the moment of our first breath until, with the last, the sun dies and another world is gone, irrecoverable, leaving a trace in the memory of shared moments with those who continue, a little further. I know this…

‘I too am a witness.’

This is an unusual post. It has nothing to say about participatory art or co-creation. It is about the eviction of a community of Roma people who have lived quietly for at least a decade in a former industrial site in Sofia, Bulgaria. To some it might appear to be ‘a quarrel in a far…