François Matarasso

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  • Enjoy the walk

    Today, I realised that I’ve spent six months writing the wrong book. Or at least writing what I thought someone else might want. I’d forgotten why, several years ago, I began to look for a new language in which to talk about people’s experience of art, in the various explorations I called Regular Marvels. Instead,…

  • I am not the milkman of human kindness

    If you’re lonely, I will call – If you’re poorly, I will send poetry Billy Bragg, The Milkman of Human Kindness (1983) I don’t remember when artists began to speak of ‘delivering’ projects, but it may have been around the time when delivery entered the rhetoric of politics. That was worrying in itself – after…

  • Keeping the art in focus

    Participatory art projects can fail for the same reasons that all projects. The bigger causes – inexperience, incompetence, lack of imagination, ego – lead to smaller and more specific ones, such as poor planning, inadequate resources and personality clashes. But participatory art projects can also fail for a reason that is specific to the practice –…

  • Co-creation and collective action, then and now

    It is a curious thing that the first official account of community arts in Britain should have been overseen by a classicist. Professor Harold Baldry (1907-91) had been Professor of Classics at Southampton University and Chairman of Southern Arts Association before becoming a member of the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1973. The year…

  • Co-creation

    Changing relationships in the networked age What is co-creation? The term has come into participatory art discourse recently, but I’ve not been able to find a clear explanation of what it describes. At face value, it seems to make sense. Participatory art is the practice of involving others in an artist’s creative process. According to…

  • ‘Sometimes you’ve got to take risks for the unknown’

    ‘Sometimes you’ve got to take risks for the unknown. You don’t know what you are going into but you’ve got to take that risk.’ Gwen Sewell, Entelechy Elders Company On a Bristol shopping street stands an outsize metal bed. On it lies an elderly woman in night clothes, propped against her pillows. People walk by,…