This section of the website gathers research reports, essays, and other texts commissioned for publications, or prepared as keynote speeches. The sections included are listed below.
Research Reports
To be added
Culture and Place
Culture and place do not always go together. There is a vast supply of commercial culture—film, TV, computer games, music— that is carefully designed to appeal to people everywhere, though of course audiences in different places reimagine it in the context of their own place and culture. But the work I’ve spent my life with, the community-based work I most care about, is inseparable from place and people. Its context is its specificity and its value. The online creative writing project I worked on during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021 was defined by Boston, the market town that was home to the writers. But alongside those creative projects, I’ve also written about culture and place as a result of research commissions, and some of that work is gathered here.
Essays and speeches
We owe the term essay to Michael de Montaigne, a writer that I find difficult (too many obscure classical references) but esteem very highly. In French, an essai means an attempt, and when you read Montaigne, you sometimes feel him attempting to organise his ideas as he writes. He re-worked his essays over the years, always trying to clarify his thought, and they often got longer as a result. I imagine that he’d have enjoyed the freedom to rewrite that comes with blogging. My essays are more prosaic, though they also get reworked. They often begin as invitations to give a talk or contribute to a publication. I enjoy being asked to think or write about something outside my main field of community art—museums, heritage, and libraries, or more recondite issues like management theory—but I suspect I end up repeating the same ideas about human rights, democracy, tolerance and respect that underpin all my work.
- Parliament of Dreams – a keynote speech originally given in 2010 in Launceston, Tasmania, for Regional Arts Australia. It sets out the foundation of my thinking about cultural democracy.
- Old Words (2002-2023) – a series of unpublished essays, many of them originating as talks, that I contributed to the MIAAW podcast platform during 2022.
François Matarasso 