MIAAW.net: Recent Episodes
Sophie Hope & Owen Kelly
Miaaw.net: four monthly series, one a week, audio essays, conversations and discussions about cultural democracy and the commons.
Week 1: Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse Week 2: Genuine Inquiry Week 3: A Culture of Possibility Week 4: Common Practice
What is cultural democracy? How can we move towards it? How likely are we to achieve it? What does it have to do with "the arts"? What does it have to do with a post-digital future? What does it have to do with the commons?
Sound artist and composer Simon James reflects on his recent project with young people in Whitehawk, initiated as part of the Class Divide campaign - fighting against the educational attainment gap in East Brighton. Sounds recorded during workshops, both on the Whitehawk housing estate and on an adjacent archaeological site, formed part of the exhibition Neolithic Cannibals: Deep Listening to the Unheard. Neolithic Cannibals recreated the Neolithic Camp - a place of communion, celebration, and ritual - as a compassionate listening space inviting audiences to discover Whitehawk's richness, joy, playfulness, and hope, empowering local voices through rarely explored sonic expressions.Simon discusses the process of the project, and how listening played a central part throughout it.
Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope discuss Solidarity Not Charity, written by Nati Linares and Caroline Woolard. This “rapid report” analyses “arts and culture grantmaking in the solidarity economy”, a term that it borrows from a long standing radical, feminist economic movement.
As often, discussing parts of the report leads to a wider discussion about the issues that the report addresses. Can we assume that grantmakers have our interests at heart? Can we assume that we have a working relationship with funders, or should we see ourselves in a struggle against what they stand for?
Whatever happened to the strategies of self-funding that people at many different times and in many parts of the world used to build autonomous oppositional structures? Has this possibility disappeared in the rush to consumption?
The book provides a valuable resource in at least three ways. It presents a coherent argument. It presents a lot of interesting case studies and examples. It serves to trigger wider discussions.
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.
This show brings you Episode 69 of a podcast called Free as in Freedom, and was released on Tuesday 12 November 2019. It was produced by The Software Freedom Conservancy.
Karen M. Sandler and Bradley M Kuhn discuss the end to Microsoft's e-book platform and move on to talk more generally about the dangers and disasters that Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) causes for software users and developers
This episode is a live recording of an event in which Sophie Hope talks with artists Amy Feneck and Ruth Beale. Together they reflect on 12 years of collaborative practice, spanning art, politics and the ongoing need to talk about economics.
The conversation that forms the heart of this episode was recorded at an event organised by the Alternative School of Economics on 9 March 2023 at Gasworks,in London, England.
In Culture of Possibility #40, Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso interview James Thompson, Professor of Applied and Social Theatre at the University of Manchester.
James Thompson was the founder In Place of War, a project researching and developing arts programs in war zones and has extensive experience working with and writing about theatre under such conditions. The project describes itself as “a global organisation that uses artistic creativity in places impacted by conflict and climate change as a tool for positive change. We enable grassroots change-makers in music, theatre and across the arts to transform cultures of violence and suffering into hope, opportunity and freedom.”
Arlene Goldbard, François and James talk about his journey and his work and what we might learn about shifting perspective from eulogy to criticism, to solidarity, to love, consciously valuing what is good.
Practitioner and researcher Sylvan Baker examines listening within applied theatre practices.
Sylvan has worked across applied theatre, socially engaged arts and education for the past 30 years, and is currently a Senior Lecturer at the Central School of Speech and Drama.
He describes a process of using ‘headphone verbatim’ to share testimonies with care-experienced young people, and shows how playback and performance change the resonance of the spoken word.
Last month we completed a three part mini-series and asked for responses. To our surprise the ones we got did not propose digital tools but enquired about a comment in the show notes here at miaaw.net.
We noted that “Rather oddly he does not mention Todoist at all despite the fact that it sits at the heart of his attempts to stay organised. He obviously didn't stay organised long enough to remember to talk about it.”
Tell us more about Todoist, you asked, and ask Owen to explain about his attempts to stay organised.
In this episode, which you can think of as a surprise appendix, Owen Kelly explains some more about his personal organisation. He uses a simplified version of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system, and uses the ToDoist app as the repository for all his tasks. He also uses it to turn tasks into calendar events which he then stores in CalDav calendars on his NextCloud server where they sync to all his digital devices.
Karen Pilkington and Sophie Hope met doing their duties as board members of a community arts organisation.
They want to get to know each other better and so in this podcast Sophie hears all about Karen’s inspiring work as a community activist in Plymouth, the origins of the Village Hub, how they’ve been organising their work through collaborative decision-making, transparent finances, disaster-proofing and how making relationships, equitable collaborations and decent conversations underpin everything.
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.
On September 23, 2022, we put out episode 20 of Common Practice, in which we talked with Beverley Harvey and Brendan Jackson about the creation of the online Jubilee Archives. Later, in episode 27, we talked with Steve Trow, one of the founders of Jubilee, about the importance of cultural capital.In this episode we conclude these discussions with a conversation with Brendan Jackson, triggered by the official finale of the Jubilee Archives programme. We ask what the project has achieved, and what Brendan sees as its future now that the construction phase has finished.We also return to the question of Laundry Line, the community and social arts collective that might serve as a very useful model for other groups needing a formal structure in order to apply for funds.
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.
We have arrived at the final podcast of 2023, which also happens to fall on the fifth Friday of the fourth month of 2023 with five Fridays in it. We therefore take a final look into the Miaaw past and listen once more to another memorable episode from our short history. This time we listen in to Owen and Sophie dig out their copies of Marxism & Literature and discuss the cultural theory that Raymond Williams develops there in considerable detail. They reflect on Williams’ insistence on keeping in mind that we live our lives as processes, and that cultural theory needs to avoid turning these into finished products that we can dissect at our leisure.Next year, Friday Number 5 will have a new focus: one that will provide you with a set of interesting cultural listening from outside our usual orbit.
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:
The efforts of community artists to serve ‘the people’ in centres of urban decay or neglected rural areas are often admirable attempts to apply in cultural terms the principle which John Wesley commended when sending his methodist missionaries to the working class: ‘Go not to those that need you, but to those that need you most.’
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”.
In 2016 five cultural workers felt frustrated by collaborative working. They wanted a tool to openly and critically talk about process. From an initial spark of inspiration they created Cards on the Table, a card game designed to help people have potentially awkward conversations about a collaborative process they had just been through.
Sophie Hope was one of those cultural workers and she went on to develop the game with Henry Mulhall. Owen Kelly talks to them about how it works, whether it works, and what plans they have for it in the future.
The website of the WHEAT Institute in Manitoba, Canada, describes Bonface Beti like this. “Bonface Njeresa Beti is an international artist-peacebuilder and educator who applies theatre-based interventions with individuals and communities to create a story of peace. He integrates and applies embodied expressive tools into larger social justice issues as a language for social justice, decolonization, and structural transformation.
He completed his undergraduate psychological counseling and theatre studies in Kenya and holds a MA degree in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Manitoba, Canada, and is currently working on his PhD at the same University. He is currently admitted to the European Graduate School in Switzerland where he’s pursuing an advanced certificate to join PhD studies in Expressive Arts and Conflict Transformation.
Bonface is also currently serving as WHEAT's Expressive Arts for Social Change and Peacebuilding Director.”
In this episode Owen Kelly talks to Bonface Beti on aspects of the workshop that he led at ICAF called “Music is at the heart of African creativity”. They discuss its form, its outcomes, the surprises within it, theatre of the oppressed, forum theatre and the workshop’s relationship to its title.
In the third special report on topics addressed at the ICAF Festival in Rotterdam in March and April 2023, Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly talk to Kerrie Schaeffer, who gave two presentations on documenting community performance processes.
According to the festival programme Kerrie set out to “examine the documentary form itself, its history, the relevance of new technologies from film and radio to documentary theatre, as well as political and ethical debates relevant to documentary theatre, film and digital media. Whilst paying close attention to practical examples, questions such as how video and film documentaries narrate aesthetic and social processes, whose voices are or aren’t presented, and how power relations between social actors involved in collaborative making practices are or aren’t presented, will arise”.
In this discussion Kerrie, Owen and Sophie examine some of issues that arose in the presentations and question the nature of documenting as an activity and the many ways in which the act of documenting can interact with, and interfere with, the process of creating community art.
Check out the copious show notes at https://miaaw.net for links to some of the events, films and ideas discussed in this episode.
In the second special report from ICAF, the international community arts festival in Rotterdam, Owen Kelly talks with Ed Carroll and Vita Gelūnienė about The Cabbage Field community opera, developed by Zemuju Sanciu Bendruomene, a community association working to develop a sustainable urban vision of a neighbourhood in Kaunas in Lithuania, that will protect the unique cultural heritage and identity of the Shančiai neighbourhood against extractive capitalism.
The libretto for The Cabbage Field was created by community members. The professional and non-professional artists of the troupe are all related to Shančiai in various ways, and all events and characters are inspired by local people and their stories.
The music was composed by Vidmantas Bartulis, winner of the Lithuanian National Prize, although he died during the process of creating the opera, leaving the musical part of the opera unfinished. All of the participating actors come directly from the community.
According to the ICAF website, "ICAF is a multi-trajectory, international program. We are at once a digital platform, a global network, and, every three years, an international festival that emerges in Rotterdam, showcasing community arts organisations, professionals, and practices from across the world. ICAF’s main goal is to offer space for reflection and development of the community arts movement, locally, nationally, and internationally. Everything ICAF produces is built around the idea that community art is a worldwide, cutting edge and urgent arts movement – the only one of its kind. Furthermore, for ICAF, understanding the context behind each community arts practice is central to all that we do, to ensure we actively build bridges to communicate between differences in knowledge and experiences across social, economic, geographic, and political boundaries."Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly attended this year’s festival - ICAF 9 - with a view to meeting people and producing a series of podcasts to help capture the energy of the festival and help spread some of the ideas. In this first special ICAF edition of our podcast, Sophie and Owen meet in a room at one of the festival sites, on the last full day of the festival, to look back over what they have experienced.
We have arrived at the first month of 2023 with five Fridays, and so we start another set of Friday Number Five. This year, as Miaaw gets ready to celebrate its fifth anniversary, we look back at some memorable episodes from our short history. We begin with the very first episode in which Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly look at a report by 64 Million Artists, and the responses it has drawn; and wonder what they thought they were up to.
Although they don't quote from it directly, they start their discussion from a perspective similar to that proposed by Steven Hadley and Elionora Belfiore in Cultural Democracy & Cultural Policy, an article they wrote in issue 221 of Cultural Trends. They wrote that:
Contemporary articulations of, and engagements with, the ideas of cultural democracy must both reconcile themselves with the nuanced and semi-documented history of cultural democracy and the significant macro-level shifts in economic, technological and social fields which have made an imperative of the need to reassess these arguments… Historical research may provide the foundation for the development of a theory of cultural democracy in relation to the issues of cultural authority and normative allocation of cultural value. This would require the theoretical development of a renewed concept of cultural democracy that acknowledges and addresses the social, cultural and economic changes that have taken place since its first formulation in the 1970s.
The issues that Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly have with Cultural Democracy in Practice lie not in its intentions, which seem good-hearted if naive, but in its lack of any historical perspective, or any suggestion that more sorts of art for more people may not mean the same as cultural democracy.
According to their website, the Antwerp-based group “wpZimmer is an international workspace for the arts, with a focus on performance, dance and hybrid artistic practices. The organisation revolves around the needs of the artists, their desire to research or create and the development of their skills and practices”.
In June 2022, in episode 17, Owen Kelly talked to two members of the collective, Helga Baert and Dušica Dražić, about wpZimmer and the project Topos 3, which they both co-curated and ran throughout June.
In this episode he looks back at Topos 3 with three of the artists who participated in the event: Siniša Ilić, Ahilan Ratnamohan, and Stanislav Shuripa.
We have more! To accompany this podcast you can find a series of five conversations recorded by Dušica Dražić, Siniša Ilić, Ahilan Ratnamohan, Stanislav Shuripa and Anna Titova during Topos 3 in the new Special Editions section of the Miaaw website.
These give some clearer, more direct, ideas of the artists’ feelings and thoughts during the moments of their explorations.
In Episode 27 of A Culture of Possibility, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard talk about — given the scale of the challenges communities face — what community-based art can do.
They share powerful ideas from John Berger and Vaclav Havel, their own sense of the current social and political context, and what makes the best work generative, engaging, and co-creative for all.
Sophie Hope draws on her recent experience as an NHS patient to explore the histories, economics and significance of the bedpan in acute care settings.
Taking the title from a 1951 article in the Canadian Medical Journal, Sophie embarks on an enquiry into why, despite protestations over 70 years ago that “the use of a bedpan is a horrid, humiliating business” it remains in usage today.
With the help of Stuart Hall’s circuit of culture method Sophie spends time contemplating this embarrassing, awkward object from different angles.
According to the Preemptive Love website “Jason ‘Propaganda’ Petty works as a poet, political activist, husband, father, academic & emcee. With LA flowing through his veins & armed with a bold message, Propaganda has assembled a body of work that challenges and guides. Propaganda’s ideas stem from where he sits at the intersection. He sees how cultures cross and inspire one another, and can see the oneness of us all. Propaganda will cause you to nod your head, but more importantly, he will stretch your mind & heart.”
In 2021 HarperOne published his book Terraform: Building a Better World. This operates across many different boundaries as it includes academic argument, history lessons, poetry, polemic, rap, stories and traditional wisdom. It also enumerates and contextualises the Black Panthers’ Ten Points, which Propaganda ties back to his upbringing as the child of Black Panthers.
The webpage for this deliberately short episode at miaaw.net includes many more links and references than usual because Owen Kelly argues that, beyond a basic introduction to the book, you would learn much more from listening to, reading and watching Propaganda himself than from any second-hand description.
Please spend some time following up the references.
Sophie Hope returns to talk to Marc Herbst about cultural movements and their crossover with political movements, “post-migrant” studies, precarious research and cultural methods for working with possibly traumatized people.
Marc has recently carried out Always Coming Home: A precarious worker’s inquiry into “creative work” in refugee homes in Saxony, Germany that looks into the relationship between art workers and refugee children and the conditions of labouring together around German concepts for cultural integration.
Marc works as an independent artist, curator and co-editor of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest.
This month Arlene Goldbard and François Mattarasso talk with Beverly Naidus about her life and work. Beverly’s art projects focus on environmental crises that create problems for humans. Her works address social issues such as racism, consumerism, body image, nuclear threats, cultural identity.
Beverly has written several artist books including One Size Does Not Fit All (1993) and What Kinda Name is That? (1996) which has been discussed by academics in the field including Paul Von Blum, Lucy R. Lippard, and reviewed by contemporary journals.
You may or may not have heard of Nick Bostrom, but he recently issued an sort-of-apology for something he wrote twenty years ago. His sort-of-apology did not receive the applause he might have expected, but instead elicited a number of sharp responses asking what purpose he thought his sort-of-apology served.
On the other hand, you may well have heard of Harry Styles and The Maroon 5, one of whom apologised recently and one of whom didn’t.
Using these and other examples Owen Kelly inquiries into the nature of apology in an age of instant opinion and social media. How can we tell a genuine apology from hollow PR, and why and when do we feel the need to insist on apologies, or to apologise ourselves?
According to Wikipedia, David Moscow “is an American actor, producer and activist. He is best known for his role as the young Josh Baskin in the 1988 film Big and as David in the 1992 musical film Newsies”. He managed Bernie Sanders media campaigns during the 2016 US election. In this episode he talks with Owen Kelly about how he moved from the media campaign to writing the television series and book From Scratch: Adventures in Harvesting, Hunting, Fishing and Foraging on a Fragile Planet, and what he learned from the journeys he went on. He discusses the relationship between tradition and community, and the importance of both in different cultures from Finland to Peru.
According to the Pixelache website, Pixelache in Helsinki “is a transdisciplinary platform for emerging art, design, research and activism. It is an association of artists, cultural producers, thinkers and activists involved in the creation of emerging cultural activities. Amongst our fields of interest are: experimental interaction and electronics, code-based art and culture, grassroot organising & networks, renewable energy production/use, participatory art, open-source cultures, bioarts and art-science culture, alternative economy cultures, politics and economics of media/technology, audiovisual culture, media literacy & ecology and engaging environmental issues”.
Owen Kelly has been a member of Pixelache for ten or more years and, in fact, the original idea to develop the series of podcasts that became Miaaw grew out of a Pixelache event in which, among many other things, Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope met for the third time and plotted a series of podcasts.
Pixelache ran a series of events and initiatives throughout 2022 to celebrate its 20th birthday, and in this month’s Common Practice Owen Kelly and Irina Mutt look at the 20th anniversary celebrations through the words of Antti Ahonen, one of the founding members.
In Episode 25 of A Culture of Possibility, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard talk with Jasmina Ibrahimovic, director of the Rotterdams Wijktheater and the International Community Arts Festival that it hosts.
Jasmina is also a dynamic force of nature who has amazing stories to tell about her journey from the former Yugoslavia to a refugee camp in the Netherlands, remarkably powerful community-based work, and much more. The festival will happen in March/April for the first time post-pandemic. Join us to learn all about it.
Moreover, we have plans to attend ICAF and (among other things) record a series of podcasts that we will broadcast almost live during the period of the festival. Stand by for news of this in the next two Miaaw Monthly newsletters.
Owen Kelly and Tomas Träskman conclude a mini-series about cultural experiments in ways of living with a discussion about micro-nations. They look at a variety of micro-nations that range from quirky hobbies and artistic performances to political activism and on to something less easily definable.
They discuss numerous examples including Sealand, which has existed for over fifty years, and Christiania, which had numerous cultural and political effects in the wider world. They also introduce many less well-known examples as well as providing links to literature on micro-nations, including the book by Erwin S. Strauss that many believe kick-started the whole movement.
François Matarasso presents an audio essay, the last in the current series, examining the depoliticisation of community art in Britain between 1970 and 2011. He wrote the essay between 2011 and 2013 and has subsequently revised it for reading here.
He argues that the Thatcher government began a concerted move to recast citizens as consumers, and to move from the communal to the strictly individual. He says that “Community art was used to describe a complex, unstable and contested practice developed by young artists and theatre makers seeking to reinvigorate an art world they saw as bourgeois at best and repressive at worst. The term fell out of favour at the beginning of the 1990s, to be replaced by the seemingly-innocuous alternative, ‘participatory arts’, though the original term is still used by some people and may even be in the process of rehabilitation”.
He produces a detailed a complex argument that uses plenty of contemporary examples ranging from Welfare State and 7:84 to ‘Swagger Jagger’, the first record by Cher Lloyd, who finished fourth in the 2010 series of The X Factor.
In 2022, on months that have a fifth Friday, we have delved into the history of radio to bring back historical examples that let us hear unfiltered aspects of the world as it seemed to our grandparents; something tangentially related to ideas of cultural democracy.
In this episode we conclude with an episode of Dragnet: “perhaps the most famous and influential police procedural drama in media history”, and one that translated from radio to television with equally popular results.
This episode, A Twenty Two Rifle for Christmas, broadcast on December 22, 1949, features Jack Webb as Sgt Joe Friday and Barton Yarborough as his partner, Sgt Ben Romero in a seasonal case. As always, it features an explicit, albeit paternalistic, moral (in this case, one still sadly applicable).
This month’s Common Practice episode occurs one or two days before the annual Christmas celebrations, depending on where you live. We have some very interesting conversations and interviews coming up in the next few months, but we worried about whether people would have the time and energy to listen to one while preparing the holiday season.
After much discussion we decided to put out a lighter festive podcast featuring Sherlock Holmes. The Night Before Christmas formed the 17th episode of season 6 of the American radio series The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, first aired on the Mutual Network (WOR-MBS) on December 24 1945, starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson. While not a direct adaptation of an Arthur Conan Doyle story, it derives from the 1892 story The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.
Petri Wine sponsored the series and you might note the way in which the wine relates to the story. Instead of having advertisements in which the actors step out of character, Petri opted to use one of the first examples of product placement in radio. The man to whom Watson tells the story offers him a glass of wine and they comment on it as part of the narrative.
Interesting and entertaining in its own right, this vintage radio show also serves as an old-fashioned festive greeting from everyone at Miaaw.
In Episode 24 of A Culture of Possibility, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard talk about Arlene’s forthcoming book. In The Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does It Mean to Be Educated? comes at its subject from three angles: paintings, including portraits of of eleven individuals whose work helped Arlene understand and become herself; a short memoir about each person, from James Baldwin to Paulo Freire to Alice Neel to Jane Jacobs; and essays that look at the harm that’s been done by privileging credentialed expertise and devaluing lived knowledge.
Tune in for the book’s backstory including family drama, fifties cultural alienation, outrage at the conversion of social goods to profit centers, a visit to a psychic, a pandemic silver lining, plus Arlene reading excerpts about Nina Simone, museum trustees’ elitism, and Isaiah Berlin!
Owen Kelly and Ken Worpole follow their discussion about the ways in which experiments with living arrangements regularly occur and then reoccur. In this month’s episode they look at cults: at how we can define these, why they grow and spread, and what this means for cultural democracy.
Their conversation begins with an article of Ken Worpole’s called 6 Days in a 70s Utopia, which New Humanist published in their Summer 2019 edition. This recounts the story of a visit from a group in Hackney to a small town in Denmark where a dedicated group led a radical experiment in education and living.
The discussion then broadens to take in questions of definition: between cults and sects, and between religious communities and political groups. This draws from a wide range of reference points.
François Matarasso presents an audio essay suggesting that, as an area of conscious policy, culture has never been more important to democratic states than it is today.
He argues that its importance grew throughout the 20th century as rapidly growing and changing mass media pushed governments to control or restrain its influence. In the past, patronage and repression had been crude but sufficient mechanisms for rulers to extend cultural influence. But in large, democratic, industrial societies, the complexity of cultural activity demanded more sophisticated responses.
In the second part of a two episode podcast, Professor Ana Laura López de la Torre and Sophie Hope discuss the specific role and function of ‘extensión’ at the Universidad de la República, Uruguay.
All academic activity is organised under 3 essential functions: teaching, research and extensión. This last function - loosely translated as ‘outreach’ - is a distinctive element of the Latin-American university movement. Extensión mandates public universities to serve society and the public good. Over the years, the way this has been interpreted and put in practice has changed alongside ideas of democracy, equality, social justice and inclusion. Today, ‘critical extensión’ is a complex field of theoretical and methodological innovation, connected to the fields of critical pedagogy, southern epistemologies and decolonial thought.
Ana Laura talks us through this function of the university and gives us a detailed account of current project working with students and an old site of detention and torture during the dictatorship.
In Episode 23 of A Culture of Possibility, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard interview Carol Bebelle, cofounder of Ashé Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans, about her decades of work for cultural democracy.
Carol “has to her credit a book of original poetry In a Manner of Speaking, and is presented among other New Orleans writers in the Anthology From a Bend in the River, edited by Kalamu ya Salaam. She has several published interviews, testimonies and a chapter in the recently published Civic Engagement in the Wake of Katrina, edited by Amy Koritz and George J. Sanchez”.
This makes for a vivid and uplifting conversation that touches on Hurricane Katrina, racial healing, the power of art and culture to root us in heritage and envision a future we want to help bring about.
Listen and be inspired!
According to Wikipedia, “Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (14 April 1891 – 6 December 1956) was an Indian jurist, economist, social reformer and political leader who headed the committee drafting the Constitution of India from the Constituent Assembly debates, served as Law and Justice minister in the first cabinet of Jawaharlal Nehru, and inspired the Dalit Buddhist movement after renouncing Hinduism”.
It goes on to say that “Ambedkar's legacy as a socio-political reformer had a deep effect on modern India. In post-Independence India, his socio-political thought is respected across the political spectrum. His initiatives have influenced various spheres of life and transformed the way India today looks at socio-economic policies, education and affirmative action through socio-economic and legal incentives. His reputation as a scholar led to his appointment as free India's first law minister, and chairman of the committee for drafting the constitution. He passionately believed in individual freedom and criticised caste society. His accusations of Hinduism as being the foundation of the caste system made him controversial and unpopular among Hindus. His conversion to Buddhism sparked a revival in interest in Buddhist philosophy in India and abroad”.
His work, straddling the line between inside and outside, between reform and revolution, between society and the individual, between religion and spirituality, offers many lessons to those interested in cultural democracy. In this episode Owen Kelly points out just a few of them.
François Matarasso reads a presentation that he originally gave as a lecture in Kirkwall, in Orkney, on 27 September 2014.
He begins by considering the poet Robert Rendall, who “was, like many Orcadians, something of a polymath, publishing on literature, natural history, archaeology and theology as well as being a painter, a fisherman and a successful businessman. Shore Poems was Rendall’s third collection and though Edinburgh and London critics may have neglected it, the book was appreciated in Orkney, where the author was held in high regard”.
The specificity of the poems - the “particularly Orcadian balancing of here and there” - leads to a discussion of wider aspects of Orcadian culture and the implications of Dunbar’s number in this context.
Echoing Wendell Berry, François notes that “Everywhere is not the same and the people who live there are not the same either. The culture of Orkney is the unique creation of interaction between people and place, coming and going, over centuries”.
In the first of a 2 part podcast, Professor Ana Laura López de la Torre discusses the history and democratic structures of the Universidad de la República, Uruguay with Sophie Hope.
Ana Laura López de la Torre is a Professor in the Facultad de Artes, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay and for 2022-23 is an Honorary Research Fellow with the School of Arts, Birkbeck. She has an established participatory arts and research practice established between 2000 and 2012 when she lived and worked in London, with major commissions from the ICA, Whitechapel Gallery, Gasworks, Tate Modern and South London Gallery, La Casa Encendida (Spain), de kunstbank (Belgium) and Demokratische Kunstwochen (Switzerland). She also worked as Associate Lecturer at the University of the Arts, London.
Since moving back to Uruguay in 2012 she has been the Director of the Centro Cultural Florencio Sánchez, a public cultural centre in Cerro, a historical neighbourhood in the periphery of Montevideo. She continued to develop her participatory arts practice in the region, developing projects related to community-based organisation, cultural democracy and environmental struggles in Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and Brazil. From 2012 to 2015 she was the Coordinator of the first Uruguayan postgraduate course in Cultural Management, at the Espacio Interdisciplinario of the Universidad de la República, where she still teaches and is part of its Academic Advisory Board. In her current post at the Universidad de la República, she leads a department specialised in community-based art, and within this department she is Coordinator of two interdisciplinary research groups: Naturaleza, Sociedad y Arte (exploring human / more-than-human relationship in urban communities) and ACTO (Art, Organised Communities and Territories).
The Universidad de la República is the public university of Uruguay. Founded in 1849, it enrols over 150 thousand students annually. It offers free tuition at undergraduate and postgraduate level in all disciplines and fields of knowledge. With its main infrastructure in Montevideo, over the last 30 years the university has embarked in a decentralisation process, creating 10 university campuses in different cities.
Although fully funded by the state, the autonomy of the university’s governance was enshrined in a national law in 1958 following 20 years of organised action by students. The governing bodies of all the Faculties and Institutes (and its central authorities) are democratically elected, with representation of teachers, students and graduate bodies, all academic, political and managerial decisions are taken by these bodies. Voting is compulsory and takes place every 4 years. The term ‘university democracy’ encompasses this form of self-governance, which over the decades has produced the ethical guides that rule academic life.
In Episode 22 of A Culture of Possibility, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard interview Yuriy Vulkovsky about his decades of experience working with communities and institutions in Bulgaria and nearby states.
You’ll learn about Bulgaria’s network of 3700 independent community cultural centers, a unique feature of this culture; and from vivid stories that illuminate the challenges and opportunities in engaging people and resources in a country marked by poverty and history, where people “live in different centuries.”
Ken Worpole and Owen Kelly discuss the question: why do we always need 'experiments in living' to see what works and doesn't work in how people live and work together? And why do these experiments never seem to reach a conclusion?
Their conversation begins with a book of Ken Worpole’s called New Jerusalem: the good city and the good society, and moves to discuss the social origins of the model towns and garden cities that spread across England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They ask what effects these had on people’s living circumstances, their culture, and their belief in democracy.
In this episode François Matarasso reads a presentation that he originally gave at Handelsbeurs in Ghent in Belgium on 6 October 2015 at the first International Symposium of the Social Impact of Making Music research centre of the Ghent University Association.
He argues that “whatever judgements we make about individual projects, we need a good understanding of what is happening and why, if we use a term such as the social impact of music-making. We should not adopt unquestioningly the thinking of those who recognise, however simplistically, the transformative power of the arts and expect to harness it for their own purposes. Whatever we think of those purposes, whether we share them or contest them, the problem is that they make some deeply misleading assumptions when they are applied to arts practice”.
On months that have a fifth Friday we break from our normal schedule and produce something tangentially related to ideas of cultural democracy. In 2022 we delve into the history of radio to bring back some historical examples of comedies, documentaries, and serials that let us hear unfiltered aspects of the world as it seemed to our grandparents.
In this episode we go back to June 3, 1956 to listen to an episode of the western series Gunsmoke. The series takes place in and around Dodge City, Kansas, in the post-Civil War era and centers on United States Marshall Matt Dillon as he attempts to enforce law and order in the city. It also focuses on Dillon's friendship with Doc Adams, the town's physician; Kitty Russell, owner of the Long Branch Saloon; and Chester, Dillon's deputy.
CBS intended Dillon as a "Philip Marlowe of the Old West", and Gunsmoke as a western series for adults. The writers emphasised the brutal nature of the so-called Old West. Charles Meston, the head writer felt disgusted by the archetypal Western hero and set out "to destroy [that type of] character he loathed". In Meston's view, "Dillon was almost as scarred as the homicidal psychopaths who drifted into Dodge from all directions." In many ways it served as an ancestor of series like Deadwood.
Jubilee Arts was a unique community arts organisation based in Sandwell in the Black Country, in the West Midlands of England. The group made a point of documenting their work, which they have worked hard to establish as a living archive. The archive documents the period 1974-94, two decades of tremendous change.
On the archive website they explain that “Locked away in the basement of West Bromwich Town Hall since the last century, in 2014-15 we dusted off the archive boxes, bringing them back to the light of day to share some our findings through a series of workshops, exhibitions and events”.
In this episode Owen Kelly talks with Beverley Harvey and Brendan Jackson, both long time members of Jubilee Arts and co-founders of the archive project, about the archive, its purpose, and its future.
François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard discuss power in the context of cultural institutions.
For cultural democrats, when does working with institutions promise real change and when does the lumbering power of institutions perpetuate the status quo despite best efforts?
In episode 21, with some funny and some infuriating stories about their work with arts agencies and foundations, Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso offer insights and guiding questions that help to clarify a confusing question.
This inquiry has a convoluted beginning. While on holiday in the north of England recently Owen Kelly found himself given a copy of a newspaper called The Light. This seemed at first like the ravings of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists. On further reading, however, it appeared more interesting than that. It proposed that the germ theory of disease transmission contained fundamental flaws.
In this episode Owen Kelly looks into the history of the controversy, and the competing claims of the germ theory and the terrain theory. He discovers a bad-tempered discussion that obscures as much as it reveals, with both sides offering dubious evidence and drawing unwarranted conclusions.
He asks how this relates to citizen science, and what it means for the informed discussion necessary to any cultural democracy.
In this episode François Matarasso reads a revised text of a speech given at the International Congress on Intangible Heritage Policy, at Willibrordhaege, Deurne, The Netherlands, on 16 February 2012. In this he discusses the differences between folk culture and heritage, and the relationships that both of these have to the concepts and practices of art.
He moves on to look at intangible heritage: what UNESCO has described as “oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, and cultural knowledge”. He looks at how this vast field might be safeguarded and developed, ans what we would need to do that.
François Matarasso published this version of the paper on 2 September 2022 at https://parliamentofdreams.com and https://miaaw.net © 2022 François Matarasso, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives 4.0 International licence.
On her website, Arlene Tucker explains her practice like this: “As an artist, diversity agent and educator, I add play elements and awareness to daily life through my art and interactions. Inspired by translation studies, animals and nature, I find ways to connect and make meaning in our shared environments. My artistic work is often process-based and it creates spaces and situations for exchange, dialogue, and transformations to occur and surprise all players. I am interested in creating projects that open up ideas and that engage the viewer; that invite the viewer to be a part of the narrative or art creation process. In translation, your participation continues to propel the story.”
In this episode she talks with Owen Kelly about her life, her training in Georgia, her work, and her decision to turn her house into a project where people can stay, play and work.
Joe Lambert is one of the originators of the digital storytelling phenomenon and founder and Executive Director of Storycenter, an international participatory media training and consulting nonprofit organization based in Berkeley. Nearly 30 years on, he talks with Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso about the practice, its ethics and values, its challenges, and its power.
For a short time in the early twenty first century Second Life, and other “virtual worlds” became a matter of general interest. Pundits saw them as the beginning of the 3D web. In the last eighteen months this kind of idea has come round again as Mark Zuckerberg has insisted that people should no longer see Facebook as a social media company, but instead seee the newly rebranded Meta as a company dedicated to bringing the metaverse to life.
From 2004 Owen Kelly spent eight years researching inside Second Life and during this time he worked with staff and students at Arcada to create a large island there called Rosario where groups of students worked. From this he developed a series of ideas about the way that so-called virtual reality actually works.
In this episode he expands on a lecture he first presented at the Max Planck Society in Hamburg in November, 2018 to inquire into what Meta actually has in mind for us.
You will find a reading list and a set of useful links for this audio essay on the page for this podcast at miaaw.net.
In this episode, François Matarasso argues that “The values and practices of contemporary European culture are still defined by ideas that emerged during the Enlightenment, and the period of industrialisation and imperialism with which it is associated. There are older influences, of course: opera emerged in Renaissance Italy, which itself took inspiration from the Classical past. But it is the Enlightenment’s invention of the Fine Arts that implicitly (and carelessly) relegated most human culture to a subordinate position as the ‘not-fine arts’, defined by adjectives such as amateur, traditional, folk or popular arts, as well as new concepts like craft and entertainment.”
He discusses the alternative views of community based arts and concludes that “ to judge from Arts Council England’s strategy document, neither tradition seems to be properly understood by those making cultural policy. Nor do they have an alternative political theory to offer. We are left with no more than good intentions in the place of the democratically accountable exercise of power.”
François Matarasso originally wrote the essay from which this episode springs in 2021 as part of ‘Opera Co-creation and performance’ for the Traction Project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. It was published on the Traction website in May 2021. This version was published on 5 August 2022 on ParliamentofDreams.com under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence.
On months that have a fifth Friday we break from our normal schedule and produce something else related in one way or another to cultural democracy. In 2022 we delve into radio archives to bring back some historical examples of serials and comedies that let us hear unfiltered aspects of the world as it seemed to our grandparents.
In this episode we go back to June 21, 1950 to listen to episode 15 of the science fiction series Two Thousand Plus. The series aired over the Mutual network from the spring of 1950 until very early in 1952. Nearly 100 30-minute episodes were produced although fewer than 20 survive as recordings.
These stories reflect the times in which they were written, and they provide a glimpse of the way mainstream media in the middle of the twentieth century viewed what they regarded as the future, and we regard as the present. Their version of the future reflects all the assumptions, biases, and prejudices of conventional nineteen fifties thinking. As such it offers us a way of understanding how we got here, and the baggage we brought with us.
A Common Practice episode.
In this episode we delve into the ever-expanding Miaaw archives to catch Sophie Hope in June 2019, talking with Sally Labern, an artist and activist living and working in north London.
They have a long and detailed discussion about the specificities of cultural organising.
They both live in the London Borough of Walthamstow, and they have both worked locally - separately and together - and they reflect on the processes they have used, the people they have encountered, the way alliances, collectives and friendships form, the problems they have encountered and the struggles they have had, and what they have learned from their work.
Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk with David Ramy and Bruno Homem of SAMP in Portugal about co-creating original opera with incarcerated youth.
This episode focuses on one of three projects that are part of Traction, “opera co-creation for social transformation.” David Ramy and Bruno Homem work with SAMP, The Sociedade Artística Musical dos Pousos, an independent music school in Leiria, central Portugal. They tell us how they worked with young inmates, their families, the cutting-edge technology of the Co-Creation Stage, and a great range of artistic collaborators to make a powerful new community opera, and what may come from it.
This episode concludes a four-part series within a series. This began in Episode 16 of A Genuine Inquiry when Owen Kelly inquired into a key question that has hovered over every one of our podcasts: what might we mean when we talk about cultural democracy? Why might people need the term, and what can they do with it? He drew upon the work of Rachel Davis DuBois to suggest that cultural democracy forms one part of a triad that includes economic and political democracy.
In Episode 17 he looked at how culture and community relate to each other, In Episode 18 he looked at how culture and economics relate to each other, and spoke about the need for rethinking the idea of universal basic income.
In this episode he looks at some aspects of the relationships between cultural democracy and politics: the problems that occur when “politician” becomes a career choice; about alternatives including those proposed by the Guild Socialists; and about the democratic need to reinstate the importance of the local. He finishes by looking into the importance of the idea of a “democracy of species” that moves culture away from the Western idea of “Man vs Nature” and towards a cultural democracy that grows from the earth.
You will find a reading list and a set of useful links for this essay on the page for this podcast at miaaw.net.
In this episode François Matarasso asks “Why is our childhood not a good guide to our children’s?” He notes that, growing up in the 1960s, he had only ”two television channels, offering just an hour or two of
children’s programmes a day, our window on the world was small and closely controlled. And the future seemed equally straightforward: there were jobs and professions to choose from and you could picture yourself living a life much like that of your parents, only better”.
He argues that for the children of the 2020s this picture no longer holds. He then looks at what children gain from the arts and the ways in which politicians have contrived to limit this access and the amount of stimulation it can provide. He ends with a plea for increased involvement, but on children’s own terms.
According to their website, the Antwerp-based group “wpZimmer is an international workspace for the arts, with a focus on performance, dance and hybrid artistic practices. The organisation revolves around the needs of the artists, their desire to research or create and the development of their skills and practices”.
They “believe that shared governance addresses the systemic questions dominating our society. It’s looking for a new sustainable way to be together and to become inclusive. It’s an act of listening and sensing, rather than a process of claiming. We’re not there yet. It’s evolving and unfinished by nature… Rethinking the way we live and work together is a collective practice, shared between artists, institutions and others. We gather around the question what can we do together that we can not do alone? Can the power of collective action move mountains?”
In this episode Owen Kelly talks to two members of the collective, Helga Baert and Dušica Dražić, about wpZimmer and the project Topoi 2022, which they have both co-curated and runs throughout June.
How and why should we evaluate community-based arts projects? In this episode, Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso offer their own answers and explore many of the ways current practice misses the mark.
They ask what has gone wrong with “best practices?” What role does risk aversion play in funding? They look at how nonprofit funding has become distorted by corporate models; the underlying class biases that shape funding; and how these problems are structural, affecting the sector regardless of how conscientious and well-intentioned the individuals running programs may be.
Arlene and François don’t always agree and you may disagree with both of them!
In Episode 16 of A Genuine Inquiry Owen Kelly inquired into a key question that has hovered over every one of our podcasts: what might we mean when we talk about cultural democracy? Why might people need the term, and what can they do with it? He drew upon the work of Rachel Davis DuBois to suggest that cultural democracy forms one part of a triad that includes economic and political democracy
In Episode 17 he looked at how culture and community relate to each other, and what we might actually do to foster community and cultural democracy. In this episode he looks at the relationship between economics and cultural democracy. He looks at some of the inequities built into our current system: daily wages vs royalties, careers vs the gig economy, showing up vs creativity. He examines proposals such as Universal Basic Income and Universal Basic Services, and asks how they could develop once we accept that communities will need to begin to foster meaning outside of work. Can we free ourselves from the work ethic and look elsewhere for the meaning in our lives?
You will find a reading list and a set of useful links for this essay on the page for this podcast at miaaw.net.
François Matarasso wrote this essay in 2010 and revised it in 2012. Ten years later, its anticipated uncertainties have become reality, but its suggestions for better approaches to arts management have had no discernible effect.
François argues that, if the Age of Reason has begun to draw to a close, that may have less to do with debates between philosophers than changes in our understanding of science. As quantum mechanics have succeeded Newtonian physics we have begun to learn to think in terms of probabilities not certainties. We don’t find it rational any more to believe in rationalist causality, at least not in regard to anything concerning human affairs. We’ve had to recognise too many unknown unknowns.
This episode considers how the arts might respond to this sense of uncertainty that — whether we like it or not — has emerged as a defining characteristic of our time.
In January 2022 Agnieszka Pokrywka spent two weeks in the Utah desert in a simulator designed to provide an analog of a Martian settlement as part of a multi-disciplinary crew. The mission occurred under the auspices of The Mars Society and took place at the Mars Desert Research Station.
In this episode she describes the application process, her arrival in Utah, the simulation itself, the work the crew did to stay alive, a medical emergency captured by The Guardian newspaper, and what happened afterwards.
She talks about the lessons she learned, and about the ways in which the experience caused her to rethink her ideas of community and culture.
Dave Loewenstein is a muralist, printmaker and community organizer based in Lawrence, Kansas. In addition to his more than twenty public works in Kansas, examples of his dynamic and richly colored community-based murals can be found across the United States, and in Northern Ireland, South Korea and Brazil. Loewenstein’s prints, which focus on social justice issues, are exhibited internationally and are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Yale University, and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles.
Arlene Goldbard and Francois Matarasso talk with Dave Loewenstein. We talk about the strength of the US mural movement, the centrality of place, the challenge of supporting the work, the amazing story of In ‘zhúje ‘waxóbe/Sacred Red Rock Project, returning a sacred object to its rightful owners, the Kaw Nation—and much more.
In the previous episode of A Genuine Inquiry Owen Kelly inquired into a key question that has hovered over every one of our podcasts: what might we mean when we talk about cultural democracy? Why might people need the term, and what can they do with it? He drew upon the work of Rachel Davis DuBois to suggest that cultural democracy forms one part of a triad that includes economic and political democracy.
In this episode he looks at how culture and community relate to each other, and what we might actually do to foster community and cultural democracy.
In this episode Francois Matarasso reads some Old Words that he wrote a long time ago, and feels have become relevant to him and us once more. This time he gives us an extract from a book called Where We Dream: West Bromwich Opera Society and the fine art of musical theatre, published in 2012 by Multistorey.
The book begins by quoting Larry Shriner, from 2001, who wrote that “the modern system of art is not an essence or a fate but something we have made”. Francois then begins by noting that “ members of West Bromwich Operatic Society can be sensitive about being called amateurs, not because it is inaccurate, but because of the perception that amateur is a synonym for mediocre, self-regarding, even incompetent. And it is true that the word is sometimes used almost as an insult—and not least between artists themselves”.
On months that have a fifth Friday we break from our normal schedule and produce something else related in one way or another to cultural democracy. In 2022 we will delve into radio archives to bring back some historical examples of serials and comedies that let us hear unfiltered aspects of the world as it seemed to our grandparents.
In this episode we go back to Halloween night on October 31, 1938.
That night Orson Welles’ and the Mercury Theater broadcast an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” that stands as a vivid reminder of the power of the media and of the general public’s vulnerability when it is gripped by fear. It also still stands as one of the great media hoaxes of the twentieth century.
Sophie Hope, Lizzie Lloyd and Katy Beinart recorded a live unedited conversation on 30 March 2022 at the Brighton Centre for Contemporary Arts during a public event to launch Lloyd and Beinart's new publication, Acts of Transfer.
The publication reflects Lloyd and Beinart's collaborative work revisiting past artworks that involve social engagement and/or public participation. The discussion here delves into their motives for doing this work, how they went about it and some of the issues and questions that emerged through the retracing of past projects to create new readings and interpretations.
Arlene Goldbard and Francois Matarasso talk with Lucy Wright, a visual artist, artistic researcher, writer, and contemporary folk artist based in West Yorkshire, England.
Who defines "folk" and why? What aspects of folk art may be invisible to (or suppressed by) tradition's gatekeepers? Can we reclaim and renew language as the practices it describes change with the times? Join us for a fascinating conversation.
In Episode 15 of A Culture of Possibility Arlene Goldbard, Owen Kelly and François Matarasso discussed the Porto Santo Charter and a set of issues that arose from that.
In this episode of A Genuine Inquiry Owen Kelly continues a line of thought from that discussion and inquires into a key question that has hovered over every one of our podcasts: what might we mean when we talk about cultural democracy? Why might people need the term, and what can they do with it?
He delves into the history of the term and finds that its original uses differ significantly from how many people would like to use it today. He draws upon the work of Rachel Davis DuBois to suggest what it could mean, and why we need the term in any progressive vocabulary.
In this episode Francois Matarasso reads some Old Words that he wrote a long time ago, and feels have become relevant to him and us once more.
Making Nothing Happen began as a talk that Francois gave on 3 September 2016, at the 5th Anniversary of Tandem, in Berlin. The Tandem Cultural Partnership promotes cooperation between artists and cultural producers in Europe and neighbouring territories including Ukraine, Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa. Francois revised it early in the darker year of 2022.
As part of the Old Words series within a series, Francois will make the printed version of this essay available for download as a pdf at his Parliament of Dreams website at the same time as this podcast appears online.
Arlene Goldbard and Francois Matarasso join forces with Owen Kelly to talk policy for cultural democracy with Owen Kelly, taking off from the Porto Santo Charter adopted last year as part of Portugal's Presidency of the Council of the European Union.
Who are such statements for?
What impact can they have?
How should they be done?
Sophie Hope has just written a contribution to a book called The Failures of Public Art and Participation. In this episode she expands upon some of the arguments in her chapter, We Thought We Were Going To Change The World: socially engaged art and cruel optimism.
She bases her analysis on a reading of Laurent Berlant’s book Cruel Optimism and uses a long running work of her own, the 1984 Dinners, as the starting point for a practical look at how we might thrive through solidarity in the face of the frustrations of our cruel optimism.
In this episode Francois Matarasso reads some Old Words that he wrote a long time ago, and feels have become relevant to him and us once more.
He analyses his initial reactions to hearing Eric Burdon singing House of the Rising Sun with the Animals as a child, and this leads him to look at wider and deeper questions about what constitutes music, and what how we might describe its effects and purposes.
As part of the Old Words series within a series, Francois will make the printed version of this essay available for download as a pdf at his Parliament of Dreams website at the same time as this podcast appears online.
Multimedia!
In the 14th episode of A Culture of Possibility, co-hosts François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard interview two accomplished makers of theater with older performers — David Slater (founder and now associate member of Entelechy Arts in South London) and Alan Lyddiard (Artistic Director of The Performance Ensemble in Leeds).
They share their stories, describe their processes in helping to create new forms of theater that serve the people they work with rather than imposing conventional forms that leave them out, and talk about the people and work that have inspired them. Alan explained that "I don't find much interest going to the theater, and seeing the well-made play anymore. I find it dull, mostly. But I find it exceptionally rewarding to be on the streets of a city and see the people working away doing what they do, and being creative in their daily lives. And that's the bit that I would like to capture and try to get hold of and try to work with and get to know better."
In 2015 Thames & Hudson published a book called “Thinking Big: how the evolution of social life shaped the human mind”. The book had three authors: Robin Dunbar, head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group at the University of Oxford; Clive Gamble, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton; and John Gowlett, Professor of Archaeology at Liverpool University.
The book developed out of a seven year research study called “Lucy to Language: The Archaeology of the Social Brain” and argues in favour of the social mind hypothesis. Simply put this states that “a link has always existed between our brains, or more precisely the size of our brains, and the size of our basic social units. We see this link as essential to understanding our evolution as a single, global species that can live in cities the size of Rio de Janeiro, drawing daily on vast amounts of information to manage our lives”.
In this episode of A Genuine Inquiry Owen Kelly asks what relevance the social mind hypothesis has for those interested in developing a coherent theory of cultural democracy.
Gretchen Coombs works as a writer and researcher with a focus on socially engaged art practices in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. She also has a postdoctoral research fellowship in design and creative practice at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.
Her new book, The Lure of the Social, acts as a creative practice ethnography, which navigates a spectrum where at one end the author works closely with socially engaged artists as part of her ethnographic research, and at the other she tries to find a critical distance to write about their art projects and the institutional structures that support their work, such as art schools and conferences.
Over the course of the book, Coombs introduces readers to artists and their work, and to the key debates and issues facing this fast-growing and emergent field. She navigates the contradictions and paradoxes of this field of practice through description and analysis and, importantly, gives voice to the artists who are working to make art relevant in times of social and political uncertainty.etchen Coombs works as a writer and researcher with a focus on socially engaged art practices in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. She also has a postdoctoral research fellowship in design and creative practice at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.
Her new book, The Lure of the Social, acts as a creative practice ethnography, which navigates a spectrum where at one end the author works closely with socially engaged artists as part of her ethnographic research, and at the other she tries to find a critical distance to write about their art projects and the institutional structures that support their work, such as art schools and conferences.
Over the course of the book, Coombs introduces readers to artists and their work, and to the key debates and issues facing this fast-growing and emergent field. She navigates the contradictions and paradoxes of this field of practice through description and analysis and, importantly, gives voice to the artists who are working to make art relevant in times of social and political uncertainty.
We have spoken with Abhijit Sinha and Megha Sharma before. They founded Project Defy, based in Bangalore, and dedicated to creating new types of learning spaces in which members of a community can come together and decide what they want to learn for themselves.
In this episode Owen Kelly talks with Abhijit about how Project Defy has coped with the devastation that the Covid-19 pandemic has caused across India. We talk about their rapid changes in approach including their digital and phone-based program FLITE, where Defy facilitators spoke with families over the phone and helped them organize learning at home while in lockdown. We also discuss two other programs that developed or changed radically during the pandemic: DASH and DISPECS.
In the 13th episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard talks with California-based visual artist Cynthia Tom, creator of A Place of One’s Own, “An art-making and exhibition-based organization dedicated to sparking the transformation of women from heartache to resilience.”
They talk about patterns of trauma arising for Asian American and other immigrant women and how art can help to heal them, patriarchy, colonization, and intergenerational relationships.
Cohost François Matarasso is taking a break and will be back in coming months.
Ellis Brooks wrote an article on Medium claiming that “NFTs Are Critical for the Future of Art”. Owen Kelly inquires into the premises of her argument and the remedy she proposes.
He argues that using blockchain technology to authenticate digital artworks will create many more problems than those it set out to solve. He also argues that the problem, as defined in the article, raises complex issues and we should not therefore take it at face value. In fact the opposite: we should interrogate it and see what lies behind it.
Blockchain technology can in principle work to support a digital commons but its current goal seems almost the opposite: to turn every aspect of living into a tradeable asset and every aspect of our living into something we can (and should) buy and sell.
Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope discuss Solidarity Not Charity, written by Nati Linares and Caroline Woolard. This “rapid report” analyses “arts and culture grantmaking in the solidarity economy”, a term that it borrows from a long standing radical, feminist economic movement.
As often, discussing parts of the report leads to a wider discussion about the issues that the report addresses. Can we assume that grantmakers have our interests at heart? Can we assume that we have a working relationship with funders, or should we see ourselves in a struggle against what they stand for?
Whatever happened to the strategies of self-funding that people at many different times and in many parts of the world used to build autonomous oppositional structures? Has this possibility disappeared in the rush to consumption?
The book provides a valuable resource in at least three ways. It presents a coherent argument. It presents a lot of interesting case studies and examples. It serves to trigger wider discussions.
Owen Kelly looks at a few of the common practices that occur in the Christmas season celebrations. Where did Santa Claus come from? How does he differ from Father Christmas? What does the Christkind have to do with any of this (and why does it sound like something from the Stephen Moffatt era of Doctor Who)?
We explore the development of the current incarnation of Santa Claus / Father Christmas during the nineteenth century, in parallel with the invention of shopping as a leisure activity and department stores as event-driven venues where shopping took place.
Finally we travel to Iceland where Vera Vestmann Kristjánsdóttir explains common practices there: including the thirteen Icelandic Santas, their use of potatoes as warnings, and the cat that hunts the coatless.
In the 12th episode of A Culture of Possibility, cohost François Matarasso returns to talk with Arlene Goldbard about the first year of the podcast.
They explore the strength of community-based arts work as reflected in the range of guests, stressing alignment around core values, the importance of emergence and allowing time for the work to unfold—and the obstacles presented by funding bodies and policymakers. It’s a wide-ranging conversation. As Francois says, our guests have been "very different people who work in very different situations and with different ways, but they all have an openness to the world and to each other and to other people. And that I think is a really valuable thing to hold on to at the moment.”
We hope you enjoy it. We also hope you’ll let us know what ideas and experiences you’d like us to feature on the podcast in 2022.
In the third episode Of Friday Number 5 Owen Kelly mused about the limitations that copyright laws impose on musicians’ abilities to use other music as starting points for their own work. He promised to think this through in a more structured way, and this represents his first attempt at doing just that.
In this episode Owen looks at the history of copyright from the invention of printing in 1476 to the creation of the Berne Convention in 1886. He asks when Mickey Mouse will step into the public domain, and points to the ways in which the copyrights laws benefit intermediaries much more than creators. He looks at three different ways in which the current laws fail everybody, writers and readers, musicians and listeners.
Finally he looks at the recent work of Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin who have developed a computer program that has recorded every possible melody (all 68.7 billion of them) via MIDI to a hard drive, and then made them available in the public domain.
He asks what conclusions we might draw from this.
Jo Coleman works as associate tutor in Film, Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College, London. She conducts practice-based research into programming practices in local community radio.
Her received her first degree (in Geography) from Cambridge University and began her professional career in radio in the late 1980’s as marketing and public relations executive for the Chiltern Radio network, and later with Jazz FM in London.
Having trained and volunteered in production and presenting at a public access/community cable television and radio station in Northern Virginia, Jo continues to volunteer in community media in the UK, and as a member of the Community Media Association.
“Digital Innovations and the Production of Local Content in Community Radio: Changing Practices in the UK” offers an overview of the new technologies, media forms, and platforms in radio production, shedding light on how digitalization is impacting the routines and experiences of a predominantly volunteer-based workforce.
Jo Coleman argues that despite the benefits of digital media, traditional aspects of programme production remain of vital importance to the interpersonal relationships and values of community radio. In this episode she talks with Sophie Hope about all of this and more.
In the first episode of Common Practice we talked with Agnieszka Pokrywka about her long-standing interest in fermentation and her creation of Ferment Radio which looks at the many feminist and queer theories of fermentation and their political and social implications.
Ferment Radio has now celebrated its first anniversary with an episode in which Tosca Terán discusses her collaborative work with mushrooms with results in some very fungi music.
Tosca Terán works as an interdisciplinary, ecofeminist, human holobiont whose work is located somewhere between art, ecology, and craft. As part of the duo Nanotopia, she takes biodata from non-human organisms as mushroom’s mycelium and translates it into music.
In this episode Owen Kelly introduces the episode and then discusses Ferment Radio’s purpose and future with Agnieszka Pokrywka.
Another podcast with a free podcast inside every packet!
Jan Cohen-Cruz wrote Local Acts, Engaging Performance, and Remapping Performance, edited Radical Street Performance, and, with Mady Schutzman, co-edited Playing Boal and A Boal Companion. She worked with A Blade of Grass, an organization that supports socially-engaged artists, from 2013-2019. She earned her PhD at NYU Performance Studies and was a longtime professor in the Drama Department, initiating its minor in applied theater.
Rad Pereira are a multi-spirit mixed Black, Indigenous Brazilian, Jewish (im)migrant artist currently based in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn). Their creative practices range from social sculpture, to popular theatrical and TV/film performance, to participatory liberatory artmaking and healing that weaves together an Afro-futurist longing for transformative justice and queer (re)Indigenization of culture.
They have curated stories from over 75 interviews and informal exchanges that offer insight into the field of Socially Engaged Performance in the United States over the past 55 years. The book’s voices bring the reader from 1965 through the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020. They point to more diverse and inclusive practices and give hope for the future of the art.
Their book, Meeting the Moment: Socially Engaged Performance, 1965–2020, by Those Who Lived It, will be published by New Village Press in May 2022.
Owen Kelly participated in an online seminar recently with Mike Ananny, an associate professor of communication and journalism at USC Annenberg, where he “studies how technologies and cultures of media production have the power to shape public life”.
In the seminar Mike Ananny talked about ethics in an age of artificial intelligence and afterwards Owen went back and looked at a 2016 paper of Ananny’s: “Toward an Ethics of Algorithms: Convening, Observation, Probability, and Timeliness” which Sage published in a journal called “Science, Technology & Human Values”.
This paper proposes the concept of NIAs, or networked information algorithms, and in this episode Owen Kelly outlines this and other key ideas from the paper and offers critical reflections on both the ideas and their utility.
With this podcast we begin a new series, Meanwhile on an Abandoned Bookshelf, in which we discuss books that mean something to us or have a particular importance for us. While we might sometimes discuss new books we will mostly concentrate on older and overlooked publications.
In this episode Owen Kelly and David Morley discuss Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century written by Christian Caryl and published in 2014.
Neither of them agree with Caryl’s political position but instead argue about the usefulness of the approach he takes to history. Rather than following an issue he traces five plot-threads across the year 1979 and argues that they intertwine in significant ways that narrative-based conventional history overlooks.
David Morley is emeritus professor at the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths in the University of London.
This month contains five Fridays and so on Friday Number Five we continue an irregular series of podcasts of music issued under Creative Commons licences: this time we have music to think about as autumn fades into winter.
The music consists in this episode consists of five different variations on one reasonably well known piece of baroque music. The variations reveal different approaches to the piece from musicians of various backgrounds, interests, and abilities.
The music also raises questions about how far and in what ways musicians may tamper with this music as compared to how far they might tamper with a piece of music by, for example, Gershwin. It raises issues about how the current copyright laws restrain our abilities and prevent contemporary musics from becoming a part of the common culture, in the way that nineteenth century and earlier music has become.
Owen Kelly raises some of these questions prior to examining them in more detail in a forthcoming episode of Genuine Inquiry.
Timo Cantell works as the director of the Urban Research and Statistics Unit of the City of Helsinki, a unit of 35 people within the city council charged with gathering data, and publishing it in ways that the citizens of Helsinki can use.
In this episode Timo Cantell talks with Owen Kelly about the ways in which the city approaches the collection, distribution and publication of public data. They discuss Kvartti, a printed and online publication produced each quarter. They talk about the approach Helsinki has adopted towards open data, and the ways in which the unit Timo leads can developed APIs so that people and organisations can analyse, combine and mix the city’s datastreams with other publicly available information.
Timo Cantell also deals with the approach of the city to the ethics of data collection, and the growing public resistance towards having personal data repurposed without explicit permission.
In the 10th episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard talks with Gary Stewart, an artist and experimental sonic musician based in London.
Arlene and Gary first met more than 30 years ago in a community arts project, and his work since that time has taken him to Africa, Latin America, the U.S., and numerous spaces in the white-box gallery and prestige festival worlds.
In this episode, Gary explains how he came to do the work he does. He explains about Dub Morphology and their approach to their work. He and Arlene explore the possibilities and challenges of bringing the emergent, co-creative, egalitarian values of community-based arts practice into other types of creation and interaction, putting marginalized voices at the forefront, and the powerful results when kids in Brazilian favelas are trusted to master the full complexity of their art.
Sophie Hope has worked as an artist and an academic. She currently works at Birkbeck, part of the University of London. Since 2010 she has co-developed a network of practice-based research students at Birkbeck, called Corkscrew. She also chairs the School of Arts Disability Committee and serves as a member of the Peltz/Arts Space Steering Committee, Birkbeck Institute of Gender and Sexuality (BIGS) and Centre for Museum Cultures Research Centre Steering Committee.
She describes her academic work as socially engaged research and in this episode of Genuine Inquiry she reflects on what the term “socially engaged research” might mean. She discusses issues of consent, power relations, and trust, among others.
In this bite-sized shorter-than-usual episode Owen Kelly offers two surprises and a look back at Clive Sinclair and the impact of the ZX Spectrum, which ushered in a brief period of democratic bedroom coding.
For a short period the ZX Spectrum, and its rivals the Commodore 64 and the BBC Micro, created an ecosystem of bedroom hobbyists-turned entrepreneurs, cassette-based games, and monthly magazines that advertised and reviewed them. The coders formed the primary audience for each other’s work and offered living examples of what Alvin Toffler referred to as prosumers.
This opened up a range of possibilities that slowly closed again as one-person companies merged until eventually more powerful computers and the emergence of giant companies like Electronic Arts turned the computer games ecology into a “proper” market in which highly paid teams of coders made proprietary games for audiences entirely different from themselves.
Rob Watson runs projects using radio and podcasting to facilitate community development, and to construct a social economy model based on the belief that people should be empowered to tell their own stories.
In this episode Rob talks to Sophie Hope about researcher positionality, the importance of authentic participation in socially engaged research, and what positive steps we might take to ensure the effective communication of important messages for ensuring meaningful engagement, improving trust in our institutions, and building a better society.
Note: this episode forms a special festival edition and is also published as one of the Corkscrew podcasts.
In the ninth episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard talks with Meena Natarajan, Artistic and Executive Director of Pangea World Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Chrissie Orr, community artist and cofounder of Seed Broadcast in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In this episode, they talk about the Seed Syllables project, facilitating dialogues with 32 community artists and cultural activists to offer a composite portrait of life in the quadruple pandemic of virus, racial violence, economic meltdown, and climate crisis — and what comes next.
Late last June while addressing a meeting of Facebook employees, Mark Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook would grow from a company involved in social media to building “a maximalist, interconnected set of experiences straight out of sci-fi — the metaverse”. He argued that “you can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content — you are in it. And you feel present with other people as if you were in other places, having different experiences that you couldn’t necessarily do on a 2D app or webpage, like dancing, for example, or different types of fitness”.
Second Life attempted to build and popularise this idea fifteen years ago with a very limited success. Two questions therefore arise. What makes Mark Zuckerberg think he can succeed where Philip Rosendale failed? What consequences will we face - socially and individually - if he actually succeeds?
In this episode of Genuine Inquiry Owen Kelly explores these questions and the deeper problems of “virtual reality”.
Jonathan Gross researches and teaches in the department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College London.
In this specially repeated episode, Sophie Hope talks to him about the relationship between autobiography and cultural action, and the needs to explore memory and history as a means of making sense of one’s own cultural politics.
During the conversation they each discuss how they came to view cultural democracy as a meaningful idea and a useful tool, and what inspired them to do so.
The conversation then broadens to include the work of Aristotle, Sheila Rowbottom, Lynn Segal and Hilary Wainwright. They then begin to ask whether we should see cultural democracy primarily as a kind of practice or as a demand for systemic change.
{openradio} describe themselves as “a platform to support independently produced open-content audio streams and provide listeners with a way to find this content”.
The team consists of Kaustubh Srikanth, who created India’s first independent online radio station, Infinity Radio, dedicated to discovering and sharing fresh music and promoting open content, and Sophea Lerner who directed Finland’s first open-content FM & online station and has championed open-content awareness in the public broadcast sector in Australia.
Outside {openradio} Kaustabh acts as an open-source technologist specialising in digital security for human rights defenders. Sophea works freelance as a creative producer, researcher and audio technologist who loves open-content, DIY broadcast operations and community tech.
In this episode Owen Kelly talks to them about how {openradio} began, what it does, and what ambitions they have for it. For serendipitous technical reasons this episode has the sound and feel of a live-streamed global broadcast from the days of Telstar.
In the eighth episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk with Bermudian artist Bill Ming in his studio in Nottinghamshire, England.
Bill’s work in sculpture, assemblage, painting, and collage draws on the whole of personal and collective history, from the racism he faced growing up in segregated schools to his reponse to the death of George Floyd, from childhood toys to the blues to the Middle Passage. He’s worked in schools and communities, his work has been exhibited in major museums, and his public art can be seen in several countries.
Bill talks about how all of this fits together, each practice informing the others, and his long journey in making art out of the materials that come to hand.
Owen Kelly has held a number of workshops in Helsinki exploring ways of making industrialised products at home. He has made face creams and oat milk. This year he turned his attention to vegan cheese which led him to look at the various ways in which industrialists have begun to create plant-based meat substitutes.
In this episode he looks at the different approaches to replacing meat before returning to the vexing question of why most vegan cheese tastes disgusting. He offers a reason that relates to the whole business of industrial substitutes, before offering a different way forward.
Following directly from last month’s episode, we revisit a discussion between Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly about the reasons that 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, when Roy Shaw at the Arts Council of Great Britain began to try to paint them as quaint missionaries. In The Arts and the People, Shaw had written that:
The efforts of community artists to serve ‘the people’ in centres of urban decay or neglected rural areas are often admirable attempts to apply in cultural terms the principle which John Wesley commended when sending his methodist missionaries to the working class: ‘Go not to those that need you, but to those that need you most.’
As Francois Mattarosso has observed, “Patrician indeed”.
Once it became clear that the Arts Council had decided 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 the conference in Sheffield in 1986 became the (not necessarily successful) attempt to launch the idea publicly.
Most months have four Fridays, and we know what to do with them. We put out a podcast: a different but related one for each Friday in the month.
Sometimes, however, a month has five Fridays, and then we do something different - usually celebrating sound in one way or another.
This month on Friday Number Five we continue an irregular series of podcasts of music issued under Creative Commons licences: music to listen to during the summer heatwave.
The music ranges from old-school EDM to soundscapes and indie folk, but it all flows together nicely. The musicians include Comfort Fit, Monopole, Nobara Hayakawa, Paper Navy, adcbicycle, Entertainment for the Brain Dead, Halogen, and Brad Sucks.
A year or so ago we talked to Monika Dutta and Jake Harries about A Little Piece of Land. Today their project seems even more relevant than it did then, and so this week we revisit that discussion to look again at the ups and downs of rewilding.
Monika Dutta and Jake Harries use A Little Piece of Land to “develop ideas and formulate questions which we can mediate via artistic production. It gives focus to our responses to: the politics and economics of globalisation; climate change; accelerations in urbanisation; the increase in an urbanised, colonising world view and the decrease in agency experienced by ordinary people in areas of activity that our ancestors would have taken for granted; and to researching and re-imagining what kind of food landscape people living on this land would have recognised before the arrival of farming”.
They explain “what it is actually like” to engage in this work, not just in theory but in day to day practice. How does rewilding work? How do they know what they can eat? How do they know how to cook it? How does this fit into their wider practice, and to the struggle towards cultural democracy?
In the seventh episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk about the explosion of story-based work in community and participatory arts and what it all means.
Antecedents include the women’s movement and the civil rights movement, and examples include a 360-degree view of the close of a psychiatric hospital to a national dialogue culminating in a "Poetic Address to the Nation.”
François and Arlene touch on the strengths of this practice, the ethical challenges, and the importance of having a clear intention.
The ideas about cultural democracy that community artists in Britain began to talk about in the 1980s had a long pre-history. One of the important strands that fed into these ideas began in about 1914 when Samuel Hobson published National Guilds: An Inquiry into the Wage System and the Way Out. He presented guilds as a socialist alternative to state control of industry or conventional trade union activity.
According to Wikipedia, the “theory of guild socialism was developed and popularised by G.D.H. Cole who formed the National Guilds League in 1915 and published several books on guild socialism, including Self-Government in Industry (1917) and Guild Socialism Restated (1920). A National Building Guild was established after World War I but collapsed after funding was withdrawn in 1921”.
In this Genuine Inquiry Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope discuss G.D.H. Cole’s book Guild Socialism Restated and inquire into the relevance guild socialism might have for debates about cultural democracy today.
As summer 2021 approaches we take stock of some of the core ideas fuelling the MIAAW podcasts.
In this first of two linked episodes we look again at the ideas behind cultural democracy, and the ways in which the community arts movement in the UK nurtured these ideas.
In 1941, in 'To Hell with Culture', Herbert Read wrote that ‘our capitalist culture is one immense veneer’; and added that the latent sensibility of the worker will ‘only be awakened when meaning is restored to his daily work, and he is allowed to create his own culture’.
In the 1950s, Raymond Williams explored the Marxist notion of cultural materialism and what it meant to understand the social and material conditions of cultural production. In his 1958 essay, ‘Culture is Ordinary’ he stated how culture should be interpreted in relation to its underlying economic systems of production.
In the 1970s these formed some of the foundational texts upon which many community artists in Britain drew.
In 1981, Jean Battersby, in her report ‘The Arts Council Phenomenon’ remarked that there was a political purpose to the community arts movement aimed at realising cultural democracy: “…some community artists see their work as the spearhead of the cultural democracy attack, a somewhat politicised movement with a strong and trenchant intellectual thrust or with unjustifiable intellectual pretensions, according to your point of view. The cultural democrats’ aim is to undermine what they see as insidious attempts by the instrument of a state establishment (the arts council) to impose an alien culture on the working class, thereby indulging in cultural colonialism or cultural imperialism.”
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly talk with Steven Hadley about his latest book, called Audience Development and Cultural Policy, published by Palgrave MacMillan.
They discuss the ways in which audience development grew out of arts marketing, and the contexts within which they both operated. They discuss the model that features in the book of two parallel traditions: the Arts Lovers and those wanting Social Justice. They look at how this fits into the 2020 policy paper from the Arts Council of England Let’s Create which, on the face of it, switches from promising to democratise the existing high culture to a position in which no art form counts as better than any other.
In the sixth episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and Francois Matarasso interview Jade Campbell and Erin Walcon of Doorstep Arts in Torbay, England. They talk about running 14 different drama groups in youth clubs, church halls, and schools; setting up Doorstop with a consciously feminist and flexible model; what it means to “co-parent” the work; engaging the hard questions in ways that respect children’s intelligence; and much more!
For the last year Owen Kelly has worked with a group of educators from across the Nordic and Baltic regions to develop the VAKEN project. This has begun developing a rapid learning process to enable students (and later others) to improve their soft skills.
The process has raised a number of interesting and difficult questions starting with “how do we define soft skills?” On the one hand they can easily seem to mean whatever you want them to mean. On the other hand it remains far from clear whose benefit they serve. Should we see them as sets of behaviours the employers increasingly demand from job applicants, or should we see them as aspects of self-development and well-being that everyone should have access to?
In this episode Owen Kelly pursues a genuine inquiry into what we might mean by soft skills, and why we might find ourselves concerned with them.
Sophie Hope and Henry Mulhall have begun work on a project within a project. They have begun creating an evaluation framework for a European Union funded project called Beyond Participation - a title that has got neatly truncated to Be Part.
In this episode Owen Kelly talks to them about this. He wants to know what the Be Part project aims to do, and how it aims to do it. He also wants to know how Sophie and Henry intend to carry out their evaluation.
Both lines of inquiry prove harder and more interesting than you might expect.
Icelandic culture offers many surprises for an alert visitor: not least in the sheer amount and quality of it.
In this episode Owen Kelly talks with Hafdís Björg Hjálmarsdóttir and Vera K Vestmann Kristjánsdóttir from the School of Business and Science at the University of Akureyri, a city of approximately 20,000 people in the north of Iceland.
They talk about the by-now unique naming convention in Iceland and how it acts as an example of cultural continuity. Akureyri houses a professional theatre, a professional symphony orchestra, and a very active cultural centre. They move on to discuss the reasons for the Icelandic investment in culture, and the participatory nature of cultural activities.
Vera and Hafdís explain how books still form an important part of the fabric of Icelandic life and an essential part of Christmas celebrations.
The web page for this episode at https://miaaw.net contains numerous links to explanatory articles and examples of the nature of cultural funding in Iceland.
In the fifth episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and Francois Matarasso interview Denise Griffin Johnson, a cultural organizer in West Baltimore on the east coast of the U.S. She talks about racial justice, building on community strengths instead of deficits, the “highway to nowhere” and more.
Denise Griffin Johnson is the director of the Arch Social Community Network in West Baltimore, a community-led cultural organizing network founded in 2015 and based at the historic Arch Social Club. Denise has decades of experience as an organizer and advocate in Baltimore, during which she has held many positions in government and nonprofit organizations and served on numerous boards and advisory groups.
She is a co-founder of CultureWorks Baltimore, a member of the national network Alternate ROOTS, and a Cultural Agent with the US Department of Arts and Culture (a non-government entity).
In 2011-2013 Denise collaborated with Alternate ROOTS and Roadside Theater to produce a cultural festival that drew an audience of 11,000, and in 2015 she collaborated with the higher education consortium Imagining America to produce a national conference and cultural organizing institute in Baltimore.
Denise is a graduate of Coppin State University, with an MS in Family Counseling.
This episode continues a trilogy of audio essays concerned with the work of Marshall McLuhan and its continuing relevance in the digital age. In this episode Owen Kelly looks at what McLuhan means by “the electric age”.
He starts at the beginning, with the introduction of street lighting in Wabash Indiana, and then looks at some illustrative examples from the invention of celebrity to the introduction of the Walkman and the arrival of the computer gaming industry. He concludes by asking which came first: the desire to publicise your sex life or the invention of the home video camera.
This builds upon McLuhan’s key concepts, outlined in the first episode, and sets the stage for the final episode which will examine the internet and world wide web from a McLuhanesque perspective, and discuss the role of “art” in a digital world.
In this episode Owen Kelly sits back while Sophie Hope shares some of her thoughts on participation and democracy.
She gives examples, some personal, of the ways in which participation can extend over time as well as space. She talks about the Joseph Beuys seminal work 7000 Acorns, and its afterlife as an inspiration to other participatory projects, some involving acorns and oaks.
Sophie draws inspiration from a series of articles and papers that are listed on the miaaw.net website and cover topics from policy making and gender politics to cultural policy in Chile and South Africa.
Most months have four Fridays, and we know what to do with them. We put out a podcast: a different but related one for each Friday in the month.
Sometimes, however, a month has five fridays, and then we have to think again. We put out an episode of our occasional series, designed for just this purpose. This, then, is the first episode of Friday Number Five.
Owen Kelly looks at (and listens to) the very first sound recordings ever made and then asks how they turned into public radio, and what we might consider the funniest radio sketch of all time.
We then find out what all this has to do with cultural democracy.
According to their website “RESHAPE is a research and development project that brings together arts organisations from the Europe and the South Mediterranean to jointly create innovative organisational models and reflect on concrete answers to crucial challenges related to the production, distribution and presentation of contemporary art practices.
“The aim of RESHAPE is to imagine an alternative to the European arts ecosystem by rethinking its instruments and collaborative models, placing them in line with artistic and social innovation and the principles of fairness, solidarity, geographic balance and sustainability”.
In this episode Sophie Hope talks with Helga Baert, Martin Schick, and Sam Trotman about Reshape and the governance of cultural organisations.
In the fourth episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and Francois Matarasso compare U.S. and European funding systems for community arts. In this discussion they are not interested in who gets funding and whether that funding is deserved. Nor are they concerned with where funding goes. Instead they focus on the underlying bases for making funding decisions in the first place.
They find that both the American and European systems are way too focused on the wrong questions, with results that are politically, ethically, and culturally problematic.
How did this happen? What would be better?
Francois and Arlene have both written a great deal about questions of cultural policy and cultural funding over many years. This discussion can only scratch the surface of their thinking. If you are interested in what they have to say then you should check their websites for articles and links.
This episode begins a trilogy of audio essays concerned with the work of Marshall McLuhan and its continuing relevance in the digital age.
In this first essay, entitled Understanding McLuhan, Owen Kelly offers a brief introduction to McLuhan’s life and work. He offers a potted biography and a quick run through his six most celebrated books, including Laws of Media, edited by his son Eric, and published eight years after his death.
He also sets the stage for the second episode by looking briefly at several of McLuhan’s key concepts from the medium is the message to media tetrads.
The availability (or unavailability) of covid-19 vaccines has become an international issue. Some people have begun asking the extent to which the problems in the supply chains stem from the proprietary nature of the vaccines and the need for exclusivity that this promotes.
At the same time a group of scientists in Finland have developed a nasal spray that they claim will prove cheaper, more effective, much easier to administer, and much easier to upgrade to deal with new variants of the virus. They have developed it as an open-source vaccine and they have found it difficult to find the funding to put it through the necessary Stage 3 tests.
In this episode of Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly discuss some of the issues surrounding the idea of open source vaccines, and the systemic issues they reveal when we start to think about them.
For over three decades, Numbi Arts has been at the forefront of archiving British Somali heritage and has become a significant part of the East London cultural scene. Last year, the organization lost its residency and is currently crowd-funding in order to secure a permanent home for their work.
In this episode of Common Practice Sophie Hope talks with Kinsi Abdulleh, who founded Numbi Arts, and Hudda Khaireh, an independent researcher who is currently an associate there.
They discuss their work, their ambitions and achievements, what drives them, and their plans to create a Somali Museum in East London to document the history of Somali-British arts and culture.
In the third episode of “A Culture of Possibility,” Francois Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard meet Clare Reynolds, one of the founders of Restoke, a group who make performances and events that tackle social issues affecting their communities.
Based in the British city of Stoke-on-Trent, where the founders grew up, Restoke’s work pursues an ambitious agenda in both its artistic and social purpose.
In the conversation Clare describes their work, with particular reference to two recent works: You Are Here and Man Up. She talks about what they do and why they do it and equally importantly, how they do it.
She also discusses The Ballroom, a project that began in December 2020 when “we received a capital grant from Arts Council England to restore and reopen the Ballroom at Fenton Town Hall as a brand new community arts venue for Stoke-on-Trent!”.
This episode concludes Sophie Hope’s trilogy of audio essays, each looking at a different aspect of cultural democracy in practice.
In this conclusion Sophie explores the relationship between arts management education and cultural democracy by introducing epistemological ethnocentrism and the need for ex-centric perspectives. Through examples, she addresses the often awkward connections between employments rights and more informal, embedded relational aspects of making, creating and culturally producing.
In this episode Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope wrap up last month’s discussion about Gamestop and move on to look at a newer internet phenomenon: Clubhouse.
They look at how this audio-only app works, ask how it has gained so much attention so quickly, and ponder about whether it means anything or not from the perspectives of cultural democracy and the open web.
This leads to a broader discussion about the business models behind online businesses and the nature of data-scraping. In the middle of all of this Sophie Hope throws in a reference to Pierre Bourdieu, who approaches power within the context of a comprehensive ‘theory of society’ which includes the concept of ‘habitus’: the way in which ‘society becomes deposited in persons in the form of lasting dispositions, or trained capacities and structured propensities to think, feel and act in determinant ways, which then guide them’.
Sophie Hope and Jenny Richards started Manual Labours in 2013 as a research project exploring our physical and emotional relationships to work. The Global Staffroom grew out of this, and Owen Kelly talks to them about it.
The project reconsiders current time-based structures of work (when does work start and end?) and reasserts the significance of the physical (manual) aspect of immaterial, affective and emotional labour. It has gone through five disctinct phases so far.
As part of the current phases Jenny and Sophie launched a live video podcast on Twitch.tv called The Global Staffroom. This took the form of “a live podcast we hosted involving conversations and interviews with people about what it feels like to care, be cared for, not be able to care at work. Over 14 weeks during lockdown, every Monday lunchtime we brought together guests from different workforces and geographies to discuss architecture of home-work, racialised experiences of lockdown, emotional labour of health workers, social reproduction and remote working.
The podcast was subsequently purchased and archived by The Edinburgh University Art Collection.”
In the second episode of "A Culture of Possibility," Francois Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard talk with Amber Hansen and Reyna Hernandez, community muralists in South Dakota, USA. The conversation touches on the importance and challenges of portraying Indigenous themes in public art, particularly in rural America; making participatory work during the pandemic; and sustaining community arts work within the U.S. support system.
In this audio essay Sophie Hope inquires into the digital while thinking about processes of evaluation.
She addresses two questions. Firstly, how and why do people in the arts understand what they do? Secondly, who speaks and who listens?
There are 5 parts to this audio essay:
Part 1: Intro;
Part 2: Key terms;
Part 3: Data is king;
Part 4: Data discrimination;
Part 5: Big data and Cultural democracy.
The last few weeks have seen shares in Gamestop, a bricks and mortar games store that has seen declining sales over recent years, suddenly and dramatically increase in price. Initially puzzling, it quickly became clear that a sub-reddit had banded together to deliberately push the share price up in order to cause pain to professional investors who had begun to short the stock.
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly discuss the way that this has unfolded to date, and its resemblance to the first economic bubble: the Dutch tulip mania of 1637. They ask whether this amounts to the empowerment of the ordinary person or an invitation to reckless stupidity.
Agnieszka Pokrywka has a long-standing interest in fermentation and we talk to her about Ferment Lab in Helsinki, and its spin-off Ferment Radio.
Fermentation has grown from a technique for making beer, cheese and pickles into a much larger area of cultural discussion that covers a wide range of interlocking topics.
In this episode of Common Practice we discuss feminist and queer theories of fermentation and the long-standing role of Sandor Katz in the fermentation revivalist movement.
In the best tradition of launching new things every copy of this podcast comes with a FREE PODCAST!
Beyond a certain point talking about a podcast becomes pointless without an opportunity to listen to it. We have therefore kept our conversation to a short introduction before playing Aga’s favourite episode of Ferment Radio so far: episode 10 featuring a conversation with Stephanie Maroney.
We last spoke with Agnieszka Pokrywka in Episode 21 of Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse about a project she co-founded called Temporary that looked to expand the idea of a self-directed venue into discussions of interaction and responsibility.
"Hope must be reinvented every day.” James Baldwin
Hosted by Arlene Goldbard and Francois Matarasso, this monthly series explores people, projects, and topics that expand possibility and choice through cultural work.
Our interests intersect in community arts and cultural policy (both broadly defined). Within those subjects, we see questions of possibility, choice, and hope as critical – especially now, as humanity struggles with the pandemic, climate crisis, and growing inequality. Virtually every community arts project engages people in working for the futures they desire, even if only on a local scale. Often that means overcoming a reluctance to get one’s hopes up for fear of being disappointed. Community artists and cultural democrats know that without dreaming together, our hopes can never be realized.
When we interview people, it won’t be just to to hear their work described, but to explore why they do it, what it means, how they hope it will engage others, what influence or change they are seeking, and so on. With each podcast, our plan is to begin with a conversation with a guest, then conclude with the two of us reflecting on what was expressed. Although we know a lot of people in our generational cohort—community arts veterans—our hope is to hear as much from younger guests reflecting on what’s happening now and what may be coming.
In the first episode of our new monthly audio essay Genuine Inquiry, Sophie Hope examines the relationship between money, culture and democracy.
She does this in the context of developments in arts management and policy, and she does this with reference to the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, north east London.
Sophie draws from two key texts: The End of Cultural Policy?, published in 2018, and Cultural Policies in the Age of Platforms, published in 2017.
Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse went on holiday on August 28, 2020, when Episode 50 went live. Our intention was to take a short break to rethink our long term strategy. For various reasons, including the covid-19 inspired lockdowns and the consequences of moving all professional activity online, the holiday lasted four months rather than the intended four weeks.
In this episode Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly look back at 2020 and where they have got to so far. They discuss the differences that the pandemic has made to their professional and personal lives. They look at what they have learned from lecturing or running workshops with groups of students over Teams or Zoom for the last nine months.
They explain their plans for Miaaw in 2021. These include expanding the website, introducing a monthly newsletter, and expanding the podcasts from every other week to weekly. They will form a foundation for creating ways of building the audience into an active community.
Every month will have now four separate but related podcasts: each with a clear mission, and all connected directly to conversations about cultural democracy and the commons. Next week we begin Episode 1 of Genuine Inquiry...
With this episode Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse reaches its fiftieth episode, and its final episode in its current form. Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly look back at what started them on this journey, their original goals, and the ways in which these developed as the series progressed.
They explain how the podcasts get made, and the recording and editing processes that they use to achieve this with little time and no money.
Finally they outline their plans for the future, which involve splitting the twice-monthly podcast into three, and (before the end of this year) four separate but linked weekly podcasts, and expanding the website into a community forum.
In Episode 40 we looked at a variety of pop, rock and folk music licensed through a creative commons licence, or made freely available.
In this episode we look at four other, quite different, musics made available in this way.
Karine Gilanyan plays the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata number 15 in D Major. Jahzzar plays the self-composed Fibonacci from his album kontra-punkte. Bob Ostertag performs Arms and Legs. Julie Licata presents her work resound.
Together these illustrate the wide variety of people who choose to present their music and sounds to the world using Creative Commons licences. All the artists chosen stand as an illustration of the fact that many talented, well known, and well respected artists have chosen, for their own reasons, to use this method to present some or all of their work.
Each of these represents a gift to the world. If you look in the references on the website you will find links to both the artists and the specific musical pieces in this episode.
We should also point out that Bob Ostertag has also just published a Home Yoga Companion book that you can download free from his website.
Please have a listen and PASS IT ON!
In this episode Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly talk with Loraine Leeson about her work, and begin by discussing her latest book: Art : Process : Change, which Routledge published in September 2019. They have recently published a paperback edition.
Loraine discusses her work from the 1970s onwards, including her work with Peter Dunn in the 1980s in London Docklands, and her subsequent work online and with a wider variety of face to face groups. She talks in particular about the twelve year Active Energy project she worked on with The Geezers, and the organic ways in which it grew.
As well as her own work, she talks about her experiences in administering and lobbying for funding, and her current role with a reinvigorated Arts for Labour.
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly continue their discussion with David Teevan, who has worked for 25 years as a cultural producer in the professional arts sector in Ireland.
In this episode David discusses some of the people and places that helped to shape the development of participatory arts in Ireland.
He also looks at how this relates to ideas of cultural democracy, and how these ideas have been discussed in Ireland.
David Teevan has worked for 25 years as a cultural producer in the professional arts sector in Ireland. He has recently completed a doctorate that examines the complex history of collaborative and participatory arts in Ireland.
In this episode he looks at some aspects of that history, as he experienced and witnessed it. He also talks about the research that he undertook and the underlying issues that his findings revealed.
David discusses all this with Sophie Hope, who took part in the examination of his thesis, and Owen Kelly, who didn’t.
A Little Piece of Land operates as a cultural project and creative exploration on a small triangle of land near Sheffield, about half an acre in size and surrounded on all sides by miles of industrial scale agriculture.
Monika Dutta and Jake Harries use it to “develop ideas and formulate questions which we can mediate via artistic production. It gives focus to our responses to: the politics and economics of globalisation; climate change; accelerations in urbanisation; the increase in an urbanised, colonising world view and the decrease in agency experienced by ordinary people in areas of activity that our ancestors would have taken for granted; and to researching and re-imagining what kind of food landscape people living on this land would have recognised before the arrival of farming”.
In this episode Monika and Jake discuss with Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly. They explain “what it is actually like” to engage in this work, not just in theory but in day to day practice. How does rewilding work? How do they know what they can eat? How do they know how to cook it? How does this fit into their wider practice, and to the struggle towards cultural democracy?
Andrew Demetrius works as curator at the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews, where he conducts doctoral research on a project currently titled The Town art of Glenrothes and David Harding.
In this episode Sophie and Andrew talk about the history of the town artist movement in Scotland, the political and economic context in which the new towns were built and the different approaches the planners and artists took to the role of artists and art in these urban developments.
They focus on the embedded approach of David Harding who lived and worked in Glenrothes for 10 years employed by the Development Corporation as an artist. They reflect on the influences Harding’s approach has had on art and regeneration processes today.
Owen Kelly talks with Jake Harries, the director of art and innovation at Access Space, in Sheffield, England.
Access Space offers people interested in art, design, computers, recycling, music, electronics, photography and more, opportunities to meet like-minded people, share and develop skills and work on creative, enterprising and technical projects.
Access Space runs Refab Space, a DIY FabLab, developed and completed in 2012. With its suite of rapid prototyping tools, including a laser cutter, 3D printer and CNC router, this benefits artists, business start-ups and the community as a whole.
Access Space offers an inclusive environment. As well as working with artists, academics, creative technologists, programmers, scientists, other professionals and students, 50% of the participation in Access Space’s activities has been from people in danger of exclusion and on the margins of society, including: people with disabilities, homeless people, ex-offenders, asylum seekers, refugees and people with mental health issues.
They discuss the ways in which the current lockdown has affected Access Space, as well as a range of issues including the commons, laser printing, open source, and possible futures.
In the previous two episodes Owen Kelly looked at cultural commons from a geographical and then an historical perspective. He played music and introduced a vintage radio programme.
In this episode he joins Sophie Hope for a detailed examination of the commons, and its possible relationship to ideas of cultural democracy.
They base their discussion on a reading of Guy Standing’s book Plunder of the Commons. They also borrow ideas from David Bollier’s book Think Like a Commoner.
In the previous episode Owen Kelly looked at songs available through the Free Music Archive, Jamendo and Tribe of Noise. We traversed the geography of the musical commons. In this episode we dive into the historical cultural commons.
We listen to the very first episode of The Shadow, a radio series that ran for thirteen seasons from 1937 to 1954. For the first eighteen months a young Orson Welles played The Shadow, and allegedly added to the dramatic quality of the series by looking at the script for the first time when he read it live on air.
Listening to this episode takes us back to the cultural diet of American families sitting around a radio at peak listening hour. We can hear how their Saturday evening entertainment sounded, rather than reading about it. We can only do this because the copyright on these broadcasts has expired. This episode serves as an example of the cultural histories that we will miss out on if the corporate hold over intellectual property continues to increase.
Our cultural history is under attack. The Shadow Knows!
In this episode Owen Kelly looks at the range of musics currently available under a creative commons licence.
He looks at some artist-released music as well as songs available through the Free Music Archive, Jamendo and Tribe of Noise. We pass through a varied landscape that includes modern pop, country, Indian jazz, folk and North African music. There is more to this than meets the ear.
You will hear David Rovics, Samie Power, Kat Penkin, Solsar, Jon Worthy & the Bends, Radha Thomas, Shoemansky, Starmob, ...mmm and Lessazo. Mmm, indeed!
Stacco Troncoso co-founded Guerrilla Translation with his partner, Ann Marie Utratel, as a living project to ground P2P and Commons theories in real practices.
He talks with Owen Kelly about the work of the group, and the ways in which they see the structure of their group as a vital part of its practice. They have developed a model of governance that guides their practice while acting as an example that others might build upon.
This model has grown into the idea of DisCos - distributed coops that exist in the market place without adopting the values of the marketplace.
Sophie Hope recorded this episode in a café in a break from her ongoing picket. (See episode 37 for details of that.) As a result you will hear an interesting variety of background noises and conversations, and feel as though you have sat down at the next table.
You will overhear a conversation with Mike Neary, Emeritus Professor of sociology at the School of Social Sciences at the University of Lincoln, whose most recent work, Students as Producers, Zer0 Books have just published.
Sophie and Mike discuss the current academic strikes across England, the idea behind teach-outs, and the role of education in establishing a post-capitalist society.
As well as podcasting and making art, Sophie Hope lectures at University College, London. The academic staff there have gone on strike to demand that their employer begins negotiations in several related areas: pensions, pay grades, differing pay in terms of gender & race, workload, and the casualisation of the teaching staff.
In this episode she explains why the staff have gone on strike, what they hope to achieve, and the complications of withdrawing your labour when your labour concerns the production of knowledge rather than tangible goods.
Owen Kelly and Irma Sippola have begun two cultural projects in Kerala, south India, in partnership with an NGO called SISP.
In this episode Sophie Hope talks to Owen about the purpose of the projects, their possible long term outcomes, and the practicality of passing on coding skills to teenagers with little or no prior experience of using computers.
In this episode Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly continue talking to Russell Southwood about ideas arising from the 1985 book What a Way to Run a Railroad that he co-authored with Charles Landry, Dave Morley and Patrick Wright.
Chapter 7 of the book looks towards the future, and the discussion looks at the cultural, economic and political issues that linger on from the nineteen eighties; sometimes in almost unchanged forms.
On October 28, 2019, Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope attended a seminar in Newcastle in which every participant had to bring a memento from their community art practice. Sophie brought a copy of What a Way to Run a Railroad, a book published by Comedia in 1985.
This sparked a lengthy discussion which resulted in us talking to Russell Southwood, one of the authors of the book. In this episode we look at how the book came to get written, and what effects it had.
In late November Owen Kelly spent two days at Slush, the annual technology event in Helsinki, aimed primarily at startups and young entrepreneurs. He noticed that the atmosphere had changed noticeably this year, and that the culture which has developed around startups appears to have discovered social responsibility.
In this episode he discusses a few of his experiences at Slush with Sophie Hope, whose scepticism about these kinds of things knows no bounds.
Sofia Bustamante works as a trainer in conflict resolution. She has a black belt in Aikido and bases her many of her workshop exercises and techniques on insights she has gained from this. She grounds her practice in an approach based on living systems, peacework, martial arts, neuroscience and work in therapeutic fields.
Her current work involves developing a systematic Conflict Resolution Pattern Language.
In this episode we talk about the relationships between her work, traditional fears of naming, and General Semantics.
In November 2019, Sophie Hope attended The Age of Cultural Participation seminar at Kultura Nova in Zagreb. Sarah Feinstein and Lucy Wright also attended. After the event ended they sat in a hotel room and discussed what they had learned, including what they had learned about how to organise conferences in keeping with principles of cultural democracy.
Stephen Pritchard has practised as a community artist, a researcher, writer, art historian, academic, activist and film maker for many years. A few months ago we learned that he had begun the process of establishing Field Community Art, which he intended to operate as an international collective.
In this episode Owen Kelly talks with Stephen Pritchard about his intentions.
Stephen talks about the challenges of working both locally and internationally through the lens of a decentralised collective. He promises that all will become clear by the end of the year.
On October 28, Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly met in Newcastle, in the north east of England, to attend a symposium called Community Arts: Practice and Processes of Production. Everyone who attended had received a request to bring an artifact with them - something that stemmed from, or reminded them of, their practice as a community artist.
Owen brought a copy of a manual for the Contagious Tapes collective: a project that Mediumwave established to enable musicians to record and distribute their own music outside the music business.
In this episode he explains Sophie’s absence, discusses the symposium, and looks at the aims, objectives, and practical outcomes of the Contagious Tape experiment.
During the previous episode Sophie Hope raised the concept of structures of feeling that Raymond Williams developed in the context of a discussion about the possible meanings of cultural democracy.
In this episode Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope dig out their copies of Marxism & Literature and discuss the cultural theory that Raymond Williams develops there in considerably more detail. They reflect on Williams’ insistence on keeping in mind that we live our lives as processes, and that cultural theory needs to avoid turning these into finished products that we can dissect at our leisure.
We examine some of the things that this might mean in practice, and what all this might mean for anyone interested in exploring ideas like cultural democracy.
George Fleming is a film maker and lecturer who has worked as a participatory artist.
During his doctoral studies he began exploring the concept of cultural democracy and produced a short film on aspects of the history of the idea for a conference. Sophie Hope attended the conference and persuaded George to join us to discuss what he learned while making the film.
He discusses the relationship between community art, participatory arts, cultural democracy and cultural diversity. He introduces us to the work of Rachel Davis Dubois, an American cultural activist who developed plans for intercultural education in the 1930s.
In this episode Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly discuss the climate strikes and raise questions about how we might respond: as activists, as consumers, as producers. They discuss the question of how consumer choice and climate change might crash into each other.
Should we change our behaviours or are we being guilt tripped? If the latter, are we actually being led down paths that will prevent us noticing the political and systemic nature of the problem?
This episode follows a slightly different format, in which Owen Kelly thinks aloud about the work of David Rovics: quoting from his writings and playing some of his music.
He pays particular attention to Rovics’ community-supported arts club, his crowdfunding activities (including the funding of his new album which he will record in Ireland this autumn), and his fledgling A Penny A Play campaign. He argues that we should see all of these as Rovics’ contribution to an ongoing drive towards cultural democracy.
Over the summer Owen Kelly has become increasingly interested in the protests at the attempts to build a Thirty Metre Telescope on the north face of Mauna Kea, on the Big Island in Hawaii, and increasingly angry at the way the project has been forced onto people, when a viable alternative exists.
In this episode he argues that the protests relate directly to ideas of cultural democracy, and to other subjects that we have touched upon in previous podcasts.
Timo Cantell works as the director of the Urban Research and Statistics Unit of the City of Helsinki, a unit of 35 people within the city council charged with gathering data, and publishing it in ways that the citizens of Helsinki can use.
In this episode Timo Cantell talks with Owen Kelly about the ways in which the city approaches the collection, distribution and publication of public data, and the tools it uses to make it open.
On April 26 and 27 the Raymond Williams Society held its annual conference which addressed the topic: Cultural Production and the Redundancy of Work: precarity, automation and critique. The Movement for Cultural Democracy organised a panel at the conference and Sophie Hope, Nick Mahony and Stephen Pritchard spoke at it.
In this episode Sophie Hope describes some of the context to Owen Kelly, and we listen to live recordings of Nick and Stephen’s presentations.
In 2016 John Fail and Agnieszka Pokrywka began the first in a series of cultural experiments. They called it Temporary and they envisaged it as a space that would be owned by the people using it.
Agnieszka talks with Owen Kelly about the ideas that fuelled the experiments, and explains what they learned and how she would approach the ideas if she ever decided to do something similar in the future.
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly use the twentieth episode of Meanwhile In An Abandoned Warehouse to look back at what has and hasn’t happened in the discussions so far. They discuss a number of ideas that have stuck in their minds, or served to start further explorations; and debate where they might go next.
Sophie Hope talks with Sally Labern, an artist and activist living and working in north London. They have a long and detailed discussion about the specificities of cultural organising, and they reflect on the processes they have used, the people they have met, the energy that they have encountered, and what they have learned from their work.
The idea of cultural democracy does not necessarily always wear that label. In different parts of the world it has acquired different names, and part of our quest is the attempt to discover it wherever we can find it hiding.
In this episode, Cathy Hunt, founder and co-director of Positive Solutions, discusses the nature of community cultural development in Australia, and its relationship to ideas of cultural democracy.
Cathy begins with a short discussion about the Women of the World festival, with which she is involved, before moving on to talk about Scott Rankin’s recent platform paper on the subject of cultural rights and the debates that this has triggered.
We then move on to look at First Nation cultural rights and cultural activism, and the different forms that cultural tourism can take, and the perennial questions of who controls it and who benefits from it.
Economics is inseparable from culture, and vice versa. The discussion about cultural tourism in its good and bad forms adds to useful extra dimension to the question of cultural democracy.
As usual, Sophie’s baby Henry plays an active role in the proceedings from time to time, and you will catch his reactions to the various topics under discussion.
Alison Jeffers talks with Sophie Hope about how she got drawn into the community arts movement, and her personal journey from then to now. They discuss how the ways in which community arts has changed direction and developed as the wider culture has changed; about the effects that the community arts movement has and hasn’t had; and what might happen next.
The conversation springs from the fact that Alison Jeffers co-edited Culture Democracy and the Right to Make Art with artist Gerri Moriarty. The book contains twelve chapters that look at the community arts movement from the 1980s until 2017, when Bloomsbury Methuen published it.
In 2018 the book was awarded Gold Open Access status, enabled through institutional funds from the University of Manchester, so you can read it online for free!
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly talk with Susanna Paasonen on her research into amateur and user-generated porn. They talk about the long and poorly documented history of user-generated erotic media and how this has both reflected and stimulated changes in technology. Does amateur porn stand outside the market place as an example of a self-selecting community engaged in a participatory culture of a more or less democratic nature? Or is it simply a shallow reflection of the dominant culture? The answer, you will be pleased to learn, proves not as simple as that.
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly talk to Abhijit Sinha about the nooks that Project Defy initiate. They discuss how nooks work, and what they mean for developing activism around maker spaces in Indian society. Finally Abhijit explains why ideas about cultural democracy do not feature much in political discussion in India yet, and how he thinks they might become useful.
In this episode Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope discuss G.D.H. Cole’s book Guild Socialism Restated, published in 1920, and ask what relevance guild socialism might have to debates about cultural democracy today.
François Matarasso has just published a new book called A Restless Art, which looks at the growth of participatory arts and how it relates to community art and the idea of cultural democracy. This episode continues his conversation with Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope. They look at how participatory art sometimes has cultural democracy as its aim, and ask what cultural democracy might mean in this context.
François Matarasso first worked as a community artist in 1981. Since then he has worked in community arts, participatory arts, and as a writer and researcher. He has just published a new book called A Restless Art, which looks at the growth of participatory arts and argues that it has succeeded in moving cultural discussions forward. In this episode he talks with Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope about the history of participatory art, and the kinds of things that have inspired him.
This episode 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. In this episode Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly continue their discussion by focusing on the resurgence of interest in ideas of cultural democracy in the 1990s and 2000s, and the relationships between these and previous ideas.
In February 2019 the report of the Cultural Cities Enquiry appeared, published by a consortium of Core Cities, Key Cities, consultants and arts funding agencies in the UK. Sophie Hope, Owen Kelly & Stephen Pritchard sat down to discuss what the report says and doesn’t say; and the ways in which it does and doesn’t say these things.
Sophie Hope and Jonathan Gross discuss the relationship between autobiography and cultural action, and the needs to explore memory and history as a means of making sense of one’s own cultural politics. During the conversation they each discuss how they came to view cultural democracy as a meaningful idea and a useful tool, and what inspired them to do so.
This episode continues a conversation between Arlene Goldbard, in New Mexico; Sophie Hope, in London; and Owen Kelly, in Helsinki. The conversation begins by discussing the US Department of Arts and Culture, where Arlene Goldbard acts as Chief Policy Wonk.
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly talk with Arlene Goldbard, a writer, social activist and consultant from the USA, whose focus is the intersection of culture, politics, and spirituality. She is a long-time advocate for cultural democracy and a creator of cultural critique and new cultural policy proposals.
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly discuss the reasons that 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, when Roy Shaw at the Arts Council of Great Britain began to try to paint them as quaint missionaries.
Megha Sharma Bhagat and Abhijit Sinha from Project DEFY in Bangalore visited Helsinki to take part in the HundrED innovation summit. Owen Kelly met them in the cafe in Kiasma, Helsinki’s modern art museum, to talk to them about culture, democracy, and radical action in India.
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly look back at some of the thinking that led to the development of the idea of cultural democracy, and the ways in which the community arts movement nurtured these ideas.
Kieran Curran has written an important essay in the online journal New Socialist, that suggests how the Labour Party manifesto of 2017 might be extended and improved in its commitment to culture. Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly look at different aspects of his article and discuss the possibilities inherent in his proposals.
The World Transformed took place in Liverpool in September 2018, just three days before Social Tools took place in Helsinki. Sophie Hope managed to attend both of them.
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly look at the recent report by 64 Million Artists, and the responses it has drawn; and wonder what they thought they were up to.