François Matarasso

Blog

arestlessart.com/

Profile

arestlessart.com/author/regula

Homepage

regularmarvels.wordpress.com

  • English visionaries: John Fox, Sue Gill and Welfare State

    A few weeks ago, I spent a day with John Fox and Sue Gill at their home on Morecambe Bay. It was one of those lovely February days where the damp of winter seems forgotten in the bright air, not spring yet, but the promise of it. The winter sunlight changed direction as the tide…

  • The difficulty of thinking outside of the box

    Community and participatory art has long roots in Britain. Its practice owes much to ideas that were developed in the 1960s and to policy pressures of the 1980s and 1990s. That long evolution has many strengths – it’s a rich field involving thousands of activists that supports a complex debate about participatory art. There’s probably…

  • Ancient roots of community art

    March was traditionally the month for hedge laying in the part of rural France where I have roots. The hazel hasn’t yet begun to bud nor the birds to nest. Cutting into the upright stems so that they can be pushed flat and woven together with stakes creates a stock-proof barrier that will last 20…

  • Why Joan Littlewood Matters – possibly more now than ever

    A guest post by Stella Duffy, theatre maker, novelist and Fun Palaces champion Joan was a working class actor and director when most actors, and especially most directors, came from privilege. She was a woman when most directors were men. She ran a major theatre venue when most people running venues were men. She worked…

  • It’s alright not to know

    Yesterday I talked with students taking a community art module at the University of Utrecht. They were an unusually diverse group from different parts of the world and an equally wide range of disciplines. Such conversations are always rewarding because they make me unsure of what I think. A generation apart, we not only know…

  • Where do you stand?

    Would you prefer to spend the next six months working on a project that would be artistically fulfilling but little more than a spectacle for the participants, or on a project that would have a deep and lasting effect on those participants but be artistically uninteresting? Everyone I ask answers this question in roughly the…