François Matarasso

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  • Feeling at home

    The democratic urgency of dialogue in a diverse world Notes for a speech at the Nordic Dialogues conference, in Oslo (Norway) on 2 December 2019. The talk was filmed so if you were there or see the video online, you’ll notice differences between these notes and what I said, but the outline of the argument…

  • Thinking about the purpose of conversation

    On Thursday evening and Friday morning I spent several hours talking about participatory art with two diverse groups in Berlin. The first were mostly friends from MitOst, a valuable civil society and culture organisation I’ve worked with before; the second were arts managers (the term covers a huge range of roles and practice) from all…

  • Rummaging in the archives

    This site began in the summer of 2015, as I started work on the book it was intended to support. Today, I saw that I’d written 199 blog posts since then (to say nothing of the pages of case studies and projects). Inevitably, some of my favourite posts have got buried in that sediment of…

  • Instrumentalisation: a convenient mask

    For as long as I can remember, the accusation of instrumentalising art has been flung at community artists, as a way of discrediting their work and its challenge to dominant practice. It’s always seemed wrong to me – not just in the sense of being an incorrect analysis of what we do, but philosophically and…

  • The invisible participants

    This is quite something. The European Commission has developed a tool to monitor and assess the performance of ‘Cultural and Creative Cities’ in Europe. It is a phenomenal task, and the most sophisticated online resource of its kind I think I’ve seen. It uses 29 indicators, grouped into ‘Cultural vibrancy’, ‘Creative economy’ and ‘Enabling environment’,…

  • None of this is easy

    A couple of days ago, I gave a lecture about art in criminal justice contexts. It’s not a field in which I have deep expertise. My experience of running art workshops in prison dates from the 1980s and early 1990s, and took place in relatively good conditions. Since then I’ve been inside only to see…