François Matarasso

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  • Singing about the darkness

    Yesterday, I recorded the next episode of A Culture of Possibility with Arlene Goldbard. I’d stepped back from the podcast last year, when I got sick, so this was our first recording for four or five months and I was anxious about how it would go. We’d actually planned to do it last week, but…

  • For John Fox

    In October, the post brought a small packet from Cumbria with familiar handwriting. The cards, prints and poetry chapbooks sent from The Beach House over the years have been precious gifts but none had quite the punch of John’s latest offering, Rehearsing a Future. On the back cover, I read:  Following a diagnosis of terminal cancer…

  • Setting my destination

    A Restless Art The print run of A Restless Art is now sold out. I’m happy it found enough readers to use up the print run. It’s still available as a PDF but I know some of us like holding a book, so I’m going to look into the feasibility of a print-on-demand edition.  It will take a…

  • A new opportunity

    Today and tomorrow sees the public launch of the Alliance for Socially Engaged Arts at the Gulbenkian centre in Lisbon. This new partnership of 11 major European foundations marks a further step in the recognition of participatory art and co-creation—what in A Restless Art, I described as its normalisation. The foundations are already supporters of organisations in…

  • Mistaking art for culture

    In the latest episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and Owen Kelly talk about State of Culture, a new report from Creative Action Europe. It’s a substantial and thought-provoking document that aims – once again – to argue for the importance of culture in democratic life. But it’s also problematic for several reasons, including its assumption that culture is good…

  • The Rome Charter

    In 2020, working from home in a locked-down world, I was asked to draft a new charter for cultural democracy conceived by the then Vice-Mayor of Rome, Luca Bergamo. From the beginning, it seemed to me that such a document would be just another piece of paper unless it was meaningful to the people of…