François Matarasso

Understanding participatory and community art (Part 1)

In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, culture stands between participation and community. Those words express the concepts most widely used to describe art made collaboratively by professional and non-professional artists: participatory art and community art.

Work in progress

In the heart of midwinter, people in Kaunas shared their community opera as a work in progress, a 40 minute celebration of

Letting go

Today, I approved the printer’s proofs—the moment of letting go. Even on Sunday, as I went through it one last time, I was finding egregious mistakes. It’s hard to believe they’ve all been caught, despite the efforts of several proofreaders. I’ve been publishing books since 1993 and it seems only to have got harder. Perhaps…

A brief observation on aerosols

Sometimes you miss the obvious thing, even when you’ve been looking at it for years. Yesterday, as I walked along the Quai de Marne to the Philharmonie de Paris in the early morning rain, I realised the part that aerosols played in the decline of the mural as a form of community art practice. I’d…

Everyone can cook

The idea that everyone can be an artist has always underpinned my work. It seems straightforward to me, but some people evidently find it difficult to accept. Part of the problem is the belief that developed in the early 19th century, during the movement we now call Romanticism, that an artist is a special kind…

Cultural democracy is a fox

A podcast about cultural democracy A long bus journey through rainy Pembrokeshire gave me time to listen to the latest episodes of Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope’s podcast about cultural democracy. Anyone interested in the theory, history and possible future of community art will enjoy these conversations. Owen Kelly played an important role in the…