François Matarasso

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  • Campaign for Cultural Democracy (1984)

    Looking up a reference, I came across the draft charter of the Campaign for Cultural Democracy. It was written in 1984, by members of the Shelton Trust (the Association for Community Artists), but not formally adopted. It’s always struck me as one of the simplest and clearest explanations of cultural democracy: This text is taken from Sally…

  • 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…