François Matarasso

Blog

arestlessart.com/

Profile

arestlessart.com/author/regula

Homepage

regularmarvels.wordpress.com

  • Understanding the resilience of community art

    Working in community art often feels precarious, certainly in comparison to more institutionalised areas of the arts sector. Funding tends to be hand to mouth, so that you never know for sure whether you’ll still be working next year. And many community art organisations have closed over the years, including some of the best. But…

  • Who is changed by participatory art?

    ‘I think people with learning difficulties have had quite a bad deal in life and I think this is finally turning the page, and making a big change in that, so I think it’s very important that people in these professions learn from us to know what we’re about and then they go into those…

  • The social impact of participation in the arts (revisited)

    The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the UK House of Commons has just announced an inquiry into the social impact of participation in culture and sport. Its terms of reference state that ‘Participation in culture and sport has a proven link to a wide range of benefits. The Committee is expected to focus on…

  • Some hard questions about participatory theatre

    ‘None of this is to say that a drama workshop should not be a space where people feel comfortable opening up, and talking about themselves and their experience. It’s only to say that we must be aware of the risks present in such a situation; and we must not mistake the emotional intensity that comes…

  • D’oh!

    Confirmation bias – the tendency we all have to over-estimate data that confirms our existing beliefs – is an obvious trap for researchers, so they have intellectual and professional guardrails to stop them falling too often. But artists are not so safe from confirmation bias, because self-belief is valued in Western art. There are original…

  • Lanterns on the Cabbage Field

    Ed Carroll and Vita Gelūnienė live in Kaunas (Lithuania) where they have been exploring ways of creating community art for several years. When Ed sent me some photos of their latest event I asked if I might share them on this blog, partly because they give a glimpse of what’s happening in a part of…