François Matarasso

A series of occasional essays, 2008 – 2023

‘Old Words’ is the title I gave to a series of unpublished essays, many of them originating as talks, that I contributed to the MIAAW podcast platform during 2022. With Arlene Goldbard, I had been contributing a monthly podcast called ‘A Culture of Possibility’, that alternated interviews with cultural activists in Europe and North America with our own conversations. When Owen Kelly, the creative engineer of MIAAW, proposed to make the podcasts weekly, I offered these essays for one of the slots.  

I wrote at the time that I wasn’t sure how many essays there would be, or who they might interest: ‘It’s perhaps just a form of tidying up. Life recently deprived me of new words, for now at least, so I fall back on old ones.’ The last in the series was published on 6 January 2023; there might be more in future. Follow the links below to download the essays.

• Old Words 1 – Music. What is it good for?, 4 March 2022
• Old Words 2 – Making Nothing Happen, 1 April 2022
• Old Words 3 – Prisoners of Love, 6 May 2022
• Old Words 4 – The Art of Uncertainty, 3 June 2022
• Old Words 5 – Playful Adventures, 1 July 2022
• Old Words 6 – Cultural Policy in a Post-Political Age, 5 August 2022
• Old Words 7 – The Shoreline and the Sea, 2 September 2022
• Old Words 8 – Music and Social Change, 7 October 2022
• Old Words 9 – Another Angle of Vision, 4 November 2022
• Old Words 10 – Approximate Projections, 2 December 2022
• Old Words #11 – ‘All in This Together’, 6 January 2023

This is the last of the ‘Old Words’ podcasts, at least for now, though Arlene and I will continue our Culture of Possibility collaboration. If you’d like to know about miaaw’s forthcoming podcasts and activities, you can subscribe to the monthly newsletter.