MIAAW.net

In Culture of Possibility #39, Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk about the difficult conditions community-based artists and groups must work under as austerity measures, encroaching authoritarianism, and challenging world problems increase.

They talk about artists’ strengths in building community for such times, and the importance of uncertainty in nurturing a culture of possibility. They encourage listeners to approach the future from the perspective of readiness: what will be needed to face challenges and opportunities, and how can you develop it?

Listeners are asked to offer their own perspectives and ideas by writing a response in the form of an email. You can find the address to write to at https://miaaw.net

Marley Starskey Butler works as a multidisciplinary artist and social worker. They have revealed that art has functioned as a therapeutic tool for them, helping them to process their own complex childhood, as well as their years in social work - and in 2023 they launched their first solo photographic exhibition, “Thirty-Six”.

They work across visual, audio, and written media and explore the intersections between art, social work as employment, and their familial lived experience of social work.

In this episode, Marley talks about workshops as spaces for listening. They describe a project where redacted social work records act as an impetus for recording a new family archive.

They also discuss listening within the context of social work, and how the chronic under-resourcing of the sector affects this.

This completes a mini-series that looks at whether or not we should feel concerned about the digital tools we use and the effects that they have on us. In this episode Owen Kelly looks at some practical examples of changes we can make and tools we can use.

He discusses why he uses Vivaldi as his browser of choice; why his websites all run on ClassicPress; what software he uses to write; which apps he use to access the fediverse; where he lives on the fediverse; and why the fediverse has replaced Big Social in his online life.

Every year some months have five Fridays, and every time this happens we find something to do there: something out of our normal schedule. We try to adopt an annual theme. In 2021 we played music licensed under creative commons licences; in 2022 we found four old radio shows; and in 2023 we looked back to four early episodes of Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse.

This year whenever we stumble into the fifth Friday of a month we will look around us and find a podcast that interests us: one published under a Creative Commons licence that relates in one way or another to our areas of interest.

Where better to start than with a podcast produced by a friend of ours with whom we have already talked? We talked with Agnieszka Pokrywka twice in 2021 about Ferment Radio. Since then she had produced 41 episodes, and the podcast has become one of the projects produced by Super Eclectic, a “a multimedia production house for the world we want” that she has founded with Humberto Duque.

Today we listen to Episode 40, "Show me your kitchen, and I will tell you who you are" with David Zilber, chef, fermenter, food scientist, and author of "The Noma Guide to Fermentation".

In this episode Sophie Hope talks to four people connected to the MA degree course in Art and Social Practice at the University of the Highlands and Islands. According to the UHI website, “We are the only university based in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and we're a little different - we offer you the choice of studying at one of our colleges or research centres, over 70 local learning centres, or online from wherever you are.”

Sophie talks with Roxane Permar, founder and programme leader; Siún Carden, lecturer and module leader; Nicola Naismith, lecturer and module leader; and Mara Marxt Lewis, former student.

The group discuss the origins of the MA, the structure and content and what it’s like to teach and study on a remote course, where students develop work in the places they live and come together via online seminars and tutorials, a virtual annual symposium and residential winter school.

In Culture of Possibility #38, Arlene Goldbard talks with Sebastian Ruth, Founder & Artistic Director and Resident Musician at Community MusicWorks in Providence, Rhode Island.

CMW describes itself as a “community-based organization that uses music education and performance as a vehicle to build lasting and meaningful relationships between children, families, and professional musicians.” Its resident musicians form a string ensemble that commissions and performs work in concert while students receive free string lessons and take part in an ongoing community of peers.

In this conversation Arlene and Sebastian explore the complex question of how classical music can connect with community arts and cultural democracy.

In the fifth episode of Ways of Listening, artist Jody Wood talks about listening as a practice of care - where to care is not to cure. Jody advocates for participatory ‘opt in’ structures for social practice art rather than co-creation, noting the complexity of human desires and potential for conflicting agendas.

She goes on to question the expectations placed on artists to solve social issues. Using examples from projects taking place with social workers and in homelessness shelters, Jody talks through the need to resist the spectacle, and keep focus on process and the power of a relational practice.

She also highlights the need to listen to yourself, as a spiritual practice of attunement.

This continues a mini-series that looks at whether or not we should feel concerned about the digital tools we use and the effects that they have on us. In this episode Owen Kelly explains three dimensions that we need to consider when thinking about the tools we use and why we use them.

In early February Sophie Hope went to Rome to present Manual Labours’ work at a conference. In this episode She and Fabiola Fiocco tell us about the workshop they did at MACRO - the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome.

The workshop was organised by Fabiola Fiocco in collaboration with the Arts Module of the Master in Gender Studies (Roma Tre University) and facilitated by Fabiola and Sophie. They explain the background to the workshop and their research into bodies at work and the politics of exhaustion.

Sophie and Fabiola then reflect on some of the themes and issues that came up during the workshop, such as where people go to both rest and rage; the dependencies and addictions that get people through the day and barriers to collectivising care and rest for freelance workers.

David Francis comes from Dumfries in the south west of Scotland, but cut his musical teeth in the north east, playing for bands like Desperate Danz Band. He moved to Edinburgh in the 1990s and became a central figure in traditional music: performing with Mairi Campbell in the successful duo The Cast while occupying key positions in the Scottish Arts Council traditional music section and the Edinburgh Folk Festival.

In Culture of Possibility #37, Arlene Goldbard talks with David Francis, who currently acts as Director of the Traditional Music Forum in Scotland, about its impressive network of traditional musicians, preservation, reinvention, formal and informal education, Scottish cultural policy and funding, and the whole tapestry of issues, questions, and possibilities it engages.

Lady Kitt is a disabled artist and drag king, describing their work as “Mess Making as Social Glue”. Kitt works on long term, collaborative projects driven by insatiable curiosity about how art can be useful.

Projects are usually punctuated by the creation of large-scale, vibrant installations / sites for exchange made from recycled paper, reused plastics and raw clay, which Kitt calls shrines. They use crafting, performance, joy and research to create objects, interactions and events, with the wild ambition of dismantling and mischievously re-crafting spaces and systems they find discriminatory, obsolete or just quite dull.

In this episode Kitt describes a ‘collaborative sandwich’ activity that helps to build relationships at the start of a community project, and ways they make space for listening throughout this work.

This episode begins a mini-series that looks at whether or not we should feel concerned about the digital tools we use and the effects that they have on us. The tools we use and the uses we make of them have changed since the web began in the early nineties. Twenty years ago people created blogs and surfed the web looking for like-minded people. Today most people create personal pages on social media platforms and search inside Facebook to find new “friends”.

Does this difference matter?

Owen Kelly looks at the history of the web and the ways that these changes happened and suggests that we can find a growing movement to reclaim the sense of discovery that used to pervade the web. He suggests that we revive the idea of the curated blog-roll and the collective web-ring, and promises that Miaaw will introduce modern versions of these on its website soon.

In Culture of Possibility #36 – the podcast’s third anniversary — Arlene Goldbard and Miaaw.net guru Owen Kelly will talk about cultural work and spirituality.

Some community artists reject non-material understandings, but Owen and Arlene each find their work infused with spiritual ideas and practices — albeit very different ones.

Is spirituality necessarily non-material? What can spiritual practice bring to our work? How can ideas and stories from sacred texts infuse and inform work for cultural democracy? How can they connect rather than separate us?

Sam Metz describes their rationale as responding to “the premise of ‘neuroqueering’ (a term first coined by Nick Walker) which seeks to undermine or subvert dominant structures that remain hostile to non-normative neurodivergent bodyminds. I am interested in exploring the idea of ‘hostile’ spaces through my work with a particular focus on what relational connections mean within ecology.”

They go on to say that “in my socially engaged practice I am interested in exploring/ co-producing and defining new moralities for social structures that are safer for neurodivergent people”.

In this episode of Ways of Listening, Sam Metz describes looking for ways of working that don't privilege vision or verbal interactions, and describes a listening practice that extends through the body. They describe the importance of attunement to micro-cues to pick up on participants’ comfort levels, and consider how relationships affect our ability to act as a ‘receiver’. Sam shares methods from their practice, such as encouraging repetitive touch as a means of connecting with embodied feedback.

Did we succeed or fail in 2023? What could this question possibly mean? Do we have any way of measuring our progress, or lack of progress? Do we need one?

By way of addressing this, Owen Kelly suggests three approaches that we might usefully continue to develop in the coming year, and (spoiler alert) none of them involving wearing Fitbits.

As always he attempts to provide some interesting concrete examples and contemporary references rather than hovering high above the clouds of theory.

Based in Bucharest, Raluca Voinea works as a curator and art critic, based in Bucharest and, since 2012 as co-director of tranzit.ro Association. In 2013 she acted as the curator of the Romanian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale and in 2015 she co-authored, with Alexandra Pirici, The Manifesto for the Gynecene: Sketch of a New Geological Era. The Manifesto subsequently became translated into several languages and included in different publications and exhibitions.

In this episode she talks with Sophie Hope about The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, described as “a bet and a promise, an experiment, and an investment into a future we can still shape”.

The station began as “a joint venture of a group of artists, curators, theorists, economists and others, who, together with tranzit.ro, co-own and co-manage a plot of land in the village Silistea Snagovului, 30 km north of Bucharest, in the proximity of a protected natural area (forest and lake)”. Raluca describes its genesis and its evolution.

Judith Marcuse has become one of Canada’s senior artist/producers, with an international career that spans over 50 years as dancer, choreographer, director, producer, teacher, writer and lecturer. In 2007 she founded the International Centre of Art for Social Change, initially as a partnership with Simon Fraser University, where she was appointed an adjunct professor.

Marcuse acted as the lead investigator of a six-year (2013- 19), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded national study on art for social change, the first of its kind in Canada, which involved some 50 Canadian artists and scholars.

On Culture of Possibility podcast #35, Arlene Goldbard talks with Judith Marcuse, based in British Columbia, Canada, and a powerhouse of imagination, production, and advocacy for more than 40 years. Among her projects have been large-scale multi-arts festivals; multi-year collaborative projects with youth; a major, Canada-wide study of community engaged art for social change; a national mentorship project; and a national network.

In January, JMP and ICASC will go into hibernation because of severe funding challenges plaguing the sector; of some 400 Canadian organizations doing community-engaged arts for social change work, 38% have closed over the last few years.

Arlene talks with Judith about her work, her long view of community-based cultural work in Canada, the sector’s financial precarity, the challenges and opportunities to come.

In his own words, Edwin Mingard works as “a socially-engaged visual artist. I work principally with moving image, making standalone artists' film and installations. My work often plays with mainstream and accessible forms – documentary, music video, magazine – so as to move beyond a traditional gallery audience.

“I am interested in who makes moving image work, how, why, and for whom. I often produce work within a discrete community or interest group, making work with a personal connection to my collaborators and broader social relevance. I want to celebrate and make visible the joy of the making process itself and explore its value for individual and collective growth and change. I develop processes to enable diverse groups of people to make work together. This focus is mirrored in the subject matter of my work, which deals with themes around our social environment and relationships with one another”.

In this episode, Edwin Mingard talks to Hannah Kemp-Welch about the need to turn off ‘broadcast mode’. Edwin brings diverse groups of people together to explore social change through moving image. He shares his learning from a long term project with young people in Stoke who were either homeless or recently experienced it, collaborating on a beautiful film called ‘An Intermission’ (2020).

Su Jones worked as the director of a-n The Artists Information Company from 1980 to 2014. Her doctoral thesis Artists livelihoods: the artists in arts policy conundrum, Manchester Metropolitan University 2015-2019, exposed baseline flaws in the interrelationship between arts policies and artists’ livelihoods over the last 30 years and articulated a unique new rationale for better support to artists that could enable many more to pursue livelihoods through art practices over a life cycle.

She now works as an independent arts researcher and writer who holds specialist knowledge and insight about the social and political environment for artists and contemporary visual arts.

Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly talk with Susan Jones about the relationships between the visual arts, arts policies, and the nature of artists’ livelihoods. They discuss these issues in relationship to the discussion about these and other related topics at the Aberdeen Summit held in June 2023.

The word falay means running water, accumulated underground through rainfall over millennia. Considered by locals of Ru-us al-Jibal as sacred, it acts as a driving force in the creation of landscapes and social practices.

In Helsinki, Zeynep Falay von Flittner has brought together a collective of transitions designers, systems thinkers, sustainability experts and researchers using system-aware creative practice to catalyse regenerative futures.

In this conversation she discusses what drives her, the work of Falay Design, her personal journey, and her roles as the founder of Design Activists for Regenerative Futures, and as a member of the board of Systems Change Finland.

On Culture of Possibility podcast #34, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard talk with Ralph Lister, executive director of Take Art in rural Somerset, England.

Take Art has been offering rural touring, projects in dance, theatre, and other arts practices, and working with artists and community groups, including schools, hospitals, day centres, youth clubs and early childhood education for going on four decades.

In this episode, they look at the ways perception, funding, and policy frameworks differ for rural and urban communities, how rural projects are networking and collaborating across Europe, and about the remarkable work Take Art has been able to carry forward, even in challenging times.

Albert Potrony’s website describes him as “an artist with a participatory practice examining ideas of identity, community and language. Potrony is interested in generating social spaces through his projects, and participation from diverse groups and individuals is a key element of his work.”

In this conversation with Hannah Kemp-Welch he introduces his participatory arts practice, describing a recent project with young fathers in Gateshead and former members of an anti-sexist men’s group. Albert and Hannah talk about collaborative practice in detail, and the role of listening within this.

‘Not knowing’ emerges as a key theme.

In this episode Owen Kelly continues a discussion begun last month. He begins by quoting a comment that ARlene Goldbard made after the last episode, and addressing the point she made.

He goes on to look at the relationship between copyright and branding, and at two recent events in which large corporations have attempted to extend the use of trademarks in predatory ways. He looks at Starbucks’ attempts to silence their union and at easyGroup, “Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou’s private investment company” and their successful attempt to shut down an indie band who have, for the last eight years, called themselves Easy Life.

Not easyLife (as in easyJet), you may note, but that traditional English expression “Easy Life”, as in “she’s opted for the easy life now”.

Sophie Hope talks to Sam Trotman, Director of Scottish Sculpture Workshop about the work SSW do in the rural community of Lumsden.

They focus on how their Community Making Space came about, who uses it and how SSW work with a wide range of makers, near and far.

They talk about working with wool, working with clay, and what’s for lunch.

On Culture of Possibility podcast #33, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard realize that, having talked a great deal about cultural democracy, they have yet to dive into the second half of that topic.

Many people take democracy for granted, but what is it really: certainly more than majority rule and voting every once in a while.

Where is it practiced? What’s standing in the way of democracy’s full realization and what can we do about it? How can culture advance democracy?

According to his website, John L. McKnight “was raised a traveling Ohioan, having lived in seven neighborhoods and small towns in the eighteen years before he left to attend Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois”.

While working at the Chicago Commission for Human Relations, the first municipal civil rights agency, he learned the Alinsky trade called community organizing. He co-founded the Health & Medicine Policy Research Group with Dr. Quentin Young, co-founded The Gamaliel Foundation with Greg Galluzzo, and was a founding board member of National People’s Action led by Gale Cincotta. He is currently on the board of Communities First Association, the Abundant Community Initiative, and the Asset-Based Community Development Institute.

In this episode Owen Kelly reads several extracts from The Careless Society, a book he has returned to several times, draws comparisons with the work of Ivan Illich, and points to McKnight’s more recent work.

On September 14 Comic Book Resources reported that “Bill Willingham, the creator of the long-running Vertigo series, Fables, which was recently revived as part of DC's Black Label line of comics, has announced that he is putting the characters into the public domain as a result of years of disputes with DC over his contractual rights to the characters of the series, which is about a group of mythological beings who were exiled from their homelands to go live among humans. … Willingham announced that, as of tomorrow, "15 September 2023, the comic book property called Fables, including all related Fables spin-offs and characters, is now in the public domain. What was once wholly owned by Bill Willingham is now owned by everyone, for all time. It’s done, and as most experts will tell you, once done it cannot be undone. Take-backs are neither contemplated nor possible."

This episode follows on from last month’s discussion of enshittification. Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly discuss whether Willingham can in fact put his creation into the public domain, how this relates to Creative Commons licences, and what all this might mean in terms of licensing work that has been co-created by a team or a community.

We have come to the third month of 2023 with five Fridays in it, and so we look back at another memorable episode from our short history. This time we listen in to Owen and Sophie continue their discussion by focussing on the resurgence of interest in ideas of cultural democracy in the 1990s and 2000s, and the relationships between these and previous ideas.

This episode stands as the third in a series. It follows on from Episode 4 which looked at a kind of pre-history of cultural democracy, and Episode 6 which discussed the relationship between the community art movement in the 1980s and cultural democracy.

They refer to the Art with People book that Malcolm Dickson edited in 1995, and look at the work of the Scottish Cultural Policy Collective. They discuss work carried out by Kings College and AHRC this century, and the attempt to build a grassroots Movement for Cultural Democracy in the last few years.

Finally they imagine the possibility of writing a history of cultural democracy that does not situate it as an oppositional movement, but sees it as a vision of a possible future.

This episode took several turns for the unexpected and veered wildly off piste in ways that turned out to make for a very interesting discussion. We begin with Chris Baldwin mysteriously missing in action, as Owen Kelly and Steve Trow discuss the ways in which the distribution of lottery funding has led to poorer areas effectively donating money for cultural provision in much richer areas.

As Steve reaches his conclusions Chris Baldwin arrives from somewhere in Bulgaria and somehow brings the recording crashing to a halt. Once we have reconnected we discover exactly what has delayed Chris, and go on to discuss what we might learn from it in terms of community, solidarity and the climate crisis.

On Culture of Possibility podcast #32, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard talk with Caron Atlas of Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts New York (NOCD-NY) and Arts & Democracy, two excellent groups that bridge culture, communities, and policy.

Caron shares a wealth of stories of how creativity can be built into the fabric of communities, informing life on the ground as well as policymaking, including NOCD-NY’s recent forum to reimagine New York City.

Learn about participatory budget, trust-based funding, and much, much more.

We spoke with Ed Carroll and Vita Gelūnienė in April, as part of the series of ICAF specials, when we discussed The Cabbage Field, a community opera developed by Zemuju Sanciu Bendruomene in Kaunas in Lithuania. While attending ICAF we discovered that Ed knew a lot more than we did about the internal workings of the Faro Convention, and we asked him to explain it to us.

In this episode Ed does just that. The Convention “is based on the idea that knowledge and use of heritage form part of the citizen’s right to participate in cultural life as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”. Article 1 of the convention states that "rights relating to cultural heritage are inherent in the right to participate in cultural life." Article 4 states that "everyone...has the right to benefit from the cultural heritage and to contribute towards its enrichment."

The convention itself acts as a “framework convention” and a kind of lodestar for FCN, the Faro Convention Network, which guides the work and offers “extensive knowledge, expertise and tools, within a framework for constructive dialogue and cooperation”.

According to Wikipedia, “Cory Efram Doctorow (born July 17, 1971) is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of its licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics”.

He recently coined the neologism “enshittification” to describe the process that online platforms go through, from offering their users free services, to offering advertisers cheap access to their users, to trapping both in a walled garden, to dying as both users and advertisers struggle to break free.

Like all neologisms the term does not teach us anything new. Rather it enables us to name and therefore discuss something we have kind-of known for some time. In this episode Owen Kelly looks at some of the implications of these discussions.

Concluding the special Miaaw at ICAF series, Owen Kelly talks with Will Weigler, a community-engaged theatre maker, writer and storyteller based in Vancouver Canada.

In 2017, his book, The Alchemy of Astonishment, won the American Alliance for Theatre & Education's Distinguished Book Award for outstanding contribution to the field. The New York City Department of Education adopted The Alchemy of Astonishment, and distributed decks of the staging strategy cards and books to K-12 theatre teachers in all five boroughs of the city.

Will Weigler acted as the official rapporteur for the ICAF Festival and we met him several times while we roamed around Rotterdam. In this conversation he talks about the nature of that role, the purpose of having a rapporteur at an event like ICAF, and the possibilities he sees for further developing the role at future gatherings.

On Culture of Possibility podcast #31, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard talk with Maribel Legarda, artistic director, and Beng Cabangon, executive director of the Philippines Educational Theater Association, PETA, founded in 1967!

PETA is an amazing amalgam of in-person performance, streaming, workshops, and festivals, led by a large group of artist-teachers, many of whom began as teenagers. We talk about PETA’s creative strategies to navigate massive political changes, the pandemic, and radical shifts in the support environment.

You will want to know more about this inspiring, resilient, community-based group.

Born in Vienna in 1926, Ivan Illich acted as a Roman Catholic priest, a theologian, a philosopher, and a radical social critic. He died in December 2002.

His 1971 book Deschooling Society criticises modern society's institutional approach to education, an approach that constrains learning to narrow situations in a fairly short period of the human lifespan. His 1975 book Medical Nemesis argues that industrialised society widely impairs quality of life by overmedicalising life, pathologizing normal conditions, creating false dependency, and limiting other more healthful solutions.

Illich called himself "a Wandering Jew and a Christian pilgrim" and we can find the core beliefs that held his intellectual wanderings together discussed in a more general form in his 1973 book Tools for Conviviality.

In this episode Owen Kelly reads excerpts from Tools for Conviviality, a book he has returned to again and again, to make sense of the arguments that Illich proposes - while wondering how we can get there from here, a question that Illich himself dismisses.

Sophie Hope recorded this live report on the final day of the Rural School of Economics summer camp, organised by Kathrin Böhm and Wapke Feenstra of Myvillages, and the Scottish Sculpture Workshop. The camp took place in July 2023 in Lumsden in Aberdeenshire, the home of the Scottish Sculpture Workshop.

She talks with fellow participants about what they got up to during the summer camp and some of the questions that came up during their stay in rural Aberdeenshire. They explore reflections and suggestions on the issue of “Who has the Energy?”, the question set for the summer camp so that they might explore the material and immaterial energies that support cultural work.

Continuing the special Miaaw at ICAF series, Owen Kelly talks with Kim Wide, the founder of Take A Part, based in Plymouth in the UK. He asks about Kim's personal journey, the work of Take A Part, and the unexpected effects that attending ICAF has had on their future practice.

On Culture of Possibility podcast #30, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard reflect on topics that are currently burning a hole in their brains:

Topics such as:

us vs. them;

what cultural democracy means and why some people can’t get it;

being a little braver.

Tune in and let us know what you think!

Hannah Kemp-Welch is a sound artist with a social practice. She creates works collaboratively and in community settings, often responding to social issues. Recent projects include ‘The Right to Record’ (2021) - a creative campaign with disabled activists, which successfully lobbied the Government to change a harmful clause within the benefits system; ‘Meet Me on the Radio’ (2020-21) - a weekly Resonance FM programme co-produced with elders isolated during lockdown; and ‘o-o-radio!’ (2023) - a project at Wysing Arts Centre, constructing homemade radios with d/Deaf young people, to better understand how hearing aids operate.

Hannah has a particular interest in transmission arts - she experiments with DIY radios and produces zines to make these technologies accessible. She is a member of feminist radio art group Shortwave Collective and arts cooperative Soundcamp, and has produced works for Radio Art Zone (2022), Movement Radio (2022), and Radiophrenia (2020-22).

In this episode Owen Kelly makes a genuine inquiry into the possible interfaces between feminism and ham radio.

According to the front page of their website, “Collective Encounters is a professional arts organisation specialising in theatre for social change through collaborative practice. We use theatre to engage those on the margins of society, telling untold stories and tackling the local, national and international concerns of our time.”

Sophie Hope talks with Annette Burghes, Aidan Jolly, and Marianne Matusz from Collective Encounters about their work, the provocations that they have organised, and the provocations they created for The World Transformed when it took place in Liverpool in September 2022.

We have come to the second month of 2023 with five Fridays in it, and so we look back at another memorable episode from our short history. This time we listen in to Owen and Sophie grappling for the first time with the relationship between what we used to call community art and ideas of cultural democracy.

The term cultural democracy began to find favour among some people working in the British community arts movement in the 1980s. They used it to describe the goal and purpose of their work, once Roy Shaw, the Secretart General of the Arts Council of Great Britain, had begun to try to paint them as quaint missionaries.

In The Arts and the People, Shaw wrote that:

As François Matarasso once observed, “Patrician indeed”.

As soon as it became clear that the Arts Council wanted to pretend that community arts had nothing to do with politics but only with a general wish to “do good”, many people began to look for an idea that could describe their ambitions in their own terms.

Cultural Democracy became that idea and a conference in Sheffield in 1986 became the (not necessarily successful) attempt to launch the idea publicly.

In this episode, Sophie Hope talks to Koh Hui Ling and Han Xuemei, co-artistic directors of the socially-engaged theatre company Drama Box in Singapore. "Founded in 1990, by Kok Heng Leun, Drama Box is a socially-engaged theatre company known for creating works that inspire dialogue, reflection and change. By shining a spotlight on marginalised narratives and making space for the communal contemplation of complex issues, it seeks to tell stories that provoke a deeper understanding of Singapore's culture, history and identity".

They discuss the nature of the organisation, its different aspects and projects, and their involvement in ICAF. They also reflect on the discussion about theatre of the oppressed during the panels they hosted in Rotterdam, and find out about their current work with young people and residents of a newly developed housing estate.

On Culture of Possibility podcast #29, listen to François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard interview members of TEAM from National Theatre Wales.

We talk with Natasha Borton, Anastacia Ackers, and Naomi Chiffi about two multi-year community projects: one in Wrexham and one in Pembrokeshire. These unfolded during COVID and engaged many hundreds of community members. One focused on nature and the environment, while the other focused on issues surrounding homelessness.

Both François and Arlene believe we can all learn a lot from the process they describe.

In early 2005, Pixelache Festival co-directors Juha Huuskonen & Petri Lievonen invited a representative of the young Wikimedia Foundation — Florence Devouard, from Paris, France — who came to present to Finnish electronic arts and sub-cultural practitioners, producers, and IT enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and media design students, the new WikiWiki way of open knowledge production. For the occasion, Pixelache had a Wikipedia page made in 2005 in Finnish.

Today it is still there, in one language, and the narrative stops in 2005.

In 2022 Pixelache began a process of renewing connections in the context of the long-term model of Wikimedians-in-residence that has been developed by the Wikimedia Foundation. The first stage of this concluded in March 2023 with the publication of 3 podcasts.

In this episode Andrew Gryf Paterson talks to Owen Kelly about the history of Pixelache’s involvement with Wikimedia, the idea of auto-archiving, various attempts to address Pixelache’s needs for archiving cultural activity as a core part of the activity itself, and the possibilities he believes lie ahead of us.

Owen Kelly has written a new book called Cultural Democracy Now, and Routledge published it at the start of the year. According to the blurb, while positioning “cultural democracy in a historical context and in a context of adjacent movements such as the creative commons, open source movement, and maker movement, this book goes back to first principles and asks what personhood means in the twenty-first century, what cultural democracy means, why we should want it, and how we can work towards it … It combines theory and practice with a view to inciting both thought and action.”

In this episode Sophie Hope talks to Owen Kelly about why he wrote it, why it has three quite different sections, and what he hopes will result from its publication. He answers with varying degrees of coherence.

Charlie Fox and Chloé Mazzani presented a project that they are currently working on at a session at ICAF that looked at four of the practical outcomes of the Faro Convention. The project springs from concern for the health of the river running through Marseilles, and during their presentation they discussed the idea of the river as a non-human living entity that can heal itself but can never return to a pristine state of grace.

In this episode Owen Kelly talks with Charlie Fox about issues of culture, democracy, and the relationships between people and the non-human that from the perspective of the Marseilles River Project.

They discuss work of the work of les Collectif des Gammares; and the need for humility and a recognition that we live inside the natural world, as one part of it, as opposed to the hubris often involved in trying to fix desperate situations that we ourselves have caused.

In Episode 28 of A Culture of Possibility, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard talk with Ben Fink and Kate Fowler about the new two-volume publication from Roadside Theater in Appalachia, Art in A Democracy, comprising play scripts and commentary from this stellar community-based theater’s history in Appalachian coal country and beyond, 1975-2000.

We touch on the need for sharing learning, generation-to-generation; the impact of changes in public funding that impose scarcity and competition; the obstacles capitalism places in the path of cultural democracy; and more.

Russell Southwood worked as a journalist before becoming one of the three founders of Comedia. He later founded the consultancy and research practice, Balancing Act, which has focused on telecoms, internet and media in sub-Saharan Africa over the last 20 years. He has previously written Less Walk, More Talk - How Celtel and the Mobile Phone Changed Africa, and with Kelly Wong, Building a Data Ecosystem for Food Security and Sustainability, Agtech V3.0.

In this episode he talks with Owen Kelly about his recent book Africa 2.0 which, its publisher says, “provides an important history of how two technologies - mobile calling and internet - were made available to millions of sub-Saharan Africans, and the impact they have had on their lives. … It analyses how the mobile phone fundamentally changed communications in sub-Saharan Africa and the ways Africans have made these technologies part of their lives, opening up a very different future”.