François Matarasso

Making peace with the past

This post was first published on A Selfless Art; you can subscribe there for updates on my thinking and the book. For a writer (or an artist of any kind) there’s only one thing worse than being unknown and that is being known for one book (or song, or film, or image). An outstanding success…

Human capabilities, imagination and magic

The concept of human capabilities – as elaborated in the writings of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum – is central to the new direction that A Selfless Art represents for me. It is, to some extent, a more sophisticated, but truer and simpler way of thinking about the outcomes of participation in art that I first developed…

Seeing a way forward

There’s a new post on A Selfless Art today, reflecting on two different talks I gave this month: please follow the link to read it and subscribe to get updates directly.

Remembering the 1980s

The Museum of Unrest is the latest project of John Phillips who was one of the founders on Paddington Printshop, a pioneering community print facility set up in the 1970s as part of the first wave of the community arts movement. It’s a fascinating online and real-world project that continues the thinking of those early…

Learning from the past, again

The publication of Talking Until Nightfall in 2020 made it easier for me to acknowledge how being the child of a Shoah survivor has influenced my thinking. In truth, my heritage and my work are inseparable. It is because of my father’s experience during the war, and how it shaped my own youth, that I…

A return to speaking

This month I have two conference speeches to give. It will be the first time in more than two years that I’ve spoken in this way and I’m doing so with some ambivalence. I accepted both invitations because they seemed more important than my personal reservations. So this week, I will talk to people involved…