François Matarasso

Full, free and equal

Public discourse is getting darker and coarser by the day. Reading the news, I was reminded of a speech I gave at five years ago at Herning Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark. Five years seems a very long time in European politics today, but when I re-read what I said then it seemed to…

Need to know – the artist’s privacy

The last post, which asked what an artist needs to know about the people they’re working with, drew lots of interesting comments and emails, including this from my friend, Bisakha Sarker: ‘As an artist I prefer not to know too many personal details. What I offer is not derived from a sense of duty to…

Need to know

At a conference in Sydney last week, I was able to catch up a little on current thinking in arts and health, a field I’ve been interested in since the 1980s, though from a participatory arts perspective rather than a therapeutic one. Arts and health has become much more accepted over those years, partly because…

Learning some humility

When I began this project, I thought it would take two years. It’s going to take at least three – and that’s just for this part. Actually, I think I’ll be working on it until I stop working at all, and then it’ll just be for others to carry on. Understanding that has been hard;…

Access to the means of cultural production

Participatory art depends on many things, including some that it is easy, in more affluent parts of the world, to take for granted. Music Fund was created in 2005 by the Belgian music director, Lukas Pairon, to get neglected musical instruments to parts of the world where they would be used. Since then, the organisation…

Talking about community

Community is such a complicated word because it points towards a profound yet contested aspect of human experience. Most people recognise and value community in some way, and that can bring out the best in us, as seen in the humanitarian responses to natural disasters. But communities, by definition, are exclusive too. In defining itself,…