NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 49th episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 21 February 2025. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net‘s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Soundcloud and find links to accompany the podcasts.
The Miaaw Review inaugural issue came out last month. It will appear five times each year. The first edition contains an essay by me and shorter pieces by Owen Kelly and François Matarasso. You have to subscribe to receive it. It’s free, you won’t be spammed, nor will your email be shared with anyone. Just enter your emailhere.
I’m happy to say that podcast cohost François Matarasso is back from medical leave! This is the first episode featuring both of us since October, and it’s great to be back! As you’ll read, this was a double occasion, François’ return and the beginning of the fifth year of the podcast. We used this episode to take stock—reviewing the guiding intentions of the past four years—and to think aloud about the future. After you listen, we’d be grateful to hear what you think is needed now (and what’s not). Please email me at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you!
I kicked things off by summarizing our intentions thus far.
“Core for me is a clear sense of the values and identity of the work. We’re always fighting for the legitimacy and value of the practices that we talk about on on this podcast, as against either what are considered mainstream theater, visual art, music, whatever, or as against things like social practice, which are seen as breaking new ground. One of my perpetual complaints is that they borrow a lot of methods from community-based arts work, but generally without acknowledgement. We bring up topics that help people to consider what their work means, where it fits, whether it’s seen clearly by other people as well as practitioners, how it’s treated, and so forth. That is sometimes clarifying.
“What can art do now? That’s a question that we’ve asked over and over. Interviewees have had a lot of different intentions and ideas about that, and it’s good to keep that conversation going. We’re both really interested in putting the work that people like those we’ve interviewed do in a larger social, cultural, and political context. The little story of a specific project in a particular place with particular aims, as we talk to the person that we’re interviewing, we’re trying to situate that in the spirit of the times, in the larger political and economic and social and cultural context. When you and I have devoted an episode to talking about funding or evaluation or ethics, that’s what we’ve been trying to do, situate the work that guests talk about in in that framework.”
François connected that to another intention. “A really important part of what I’m trying to do in all of my work, I talk about encouragement. I like the word because in its origins it’s about giving people courage. Yesterday, I had a email from a young mother, an artist living in in one of the Southern European countries, taking an opportunity while her daughter was asleep, to write and and talk to some extent about how difficult her working life has been, to get funding, to get credibility, to get support. But it’s never difficult to find people to work with, or to be appreciated by the people that she’s working with. We are living in reactionary, dangerous times when many of our core values are overtly under attack. For me, one of the central challenges is how can I speak to people truthfully and encourage them in a situation that is so daunting?”
“We’ve also done some things we hope will be useful” I added. “From time to time we have a conversation as Owen and I just did about a cultural policy document of some kind, or some kind of a new program, or way of looking at cultural policy that’s being announced. I wish I could say sometimes we just love it and sometimes we really have problems with it, but the truth is, we always have problems with it because the powers that be tend to be barking up the wrong tree.”
François didn’t mince words. “I’d be even more brutal. I’d say that what I’ve noticed in the 45 years of my working life is that very few people in politics or which is worse, in senior positions in the arts and cultural world, even understand the basic concepts of cultural policy. They just shuffle words around and choose words that sound nice, but they are literally incapable of constructing a meaningful cultural policy that could be turned into a plan of action. It’s rhetorical candy floss intended to make the organizations producing them look good. I’m sorry that’s harsh, but I really do feel that there is an intellectual emptiness in cultural policy today.”
I agreed, and described an irony I’ve noticed. “The thing that’s been challenging for me, especially in the past few years, has been how little interest there seems to be in addressing that, even within the community of people who are doing the work. I understand that it’s discouragement, because a lot of things have been tried and failed. It’s a feeling of ‘as it has been so it shall always be.’” There’s no opening to get in and move something around. Here in the states, some private sector entities have been experimenting with specific things like guaranteed income initiatives on a small scale for artists only, with some need-based criteria that run counter to the original idea of basic income. I don’t know if they really have the hope that then these things will be picked up by the public sector, which is the only way that they would be capable of operating on a truly meaningful scale. But there’s no sign that they’ll be picked up by the public sector; especially under Trump, it’s the opposite. It’s kind of like keeping a candle burning. When we talk about what’s happening in this area, at least we’re helping a few people to get acquainted with it and maybe decide if there is some way to respond.”
So what could the A Culture of Possibility podcast do now, under emergent conditions that are even more antithetical to cultural democracy than the prior status quo?
François sketched out some of those conditions. “Because of choices that have been made over the last decades, we have a lot of financial chickens coming home to roost, and budgets have never been quite as tight. Deficits have never been as high, both on national levels and in many organizations. At the beginning of this year, I wrote a blog post that was really an act of will, as much for myself as anyone else, that I called ‘Hope.’ It’s not a feeling, it’s a decision. The choice of hope begins with not accepting the narratives of inequality and oppression that are increasingly being advocated as normal.”
I mentioned one type of hope I didn’t exactly like having to say, which is that with Trump’s barrage of edicts radically changing public policy and action, many people will likely be directly affected. There’s a Congressional election in two years that may shift the distribution of power somewhat, reinstalling some checks and balances that are currently MIA. “I’m not saying Trump is Hitler, but the idea of the Thousand Year Reich is pretty much the same tone of voice that we’re hearing: this is a new social order, it will be eternal, and nothing will ever disrupt it—contrary to pretty much all of human history. So one possibility is that the bad stuff produces a reaction that brings something better about.” François pointed out that was conditioned on putting forward a meaningful vision of the society we want to build, instead of just being reactive.
“Most people want to live in peace,” he said. “Want justice. Want fairness. Want to treat their neighbors and be treated by them with dignity and with respect. The work that you and I have been involved in over the years, that’s exactly where that exists. It exists in the grassroots, in communities, among people who are willing to work together to make a change for the better. It’s from there that there has to come a better vision and a better way of explaining that vision, of communicating it to people that says it doesn’t have to be like this. There is a way of living that respects all of life, that respects humanity, that respects nature, that respects a planet that doesn’t put profit and and individual riches before everything.”
Throughout the episode, we talked about possible futures. About resistance. About the importance of the small and local. About how funding is likely to change (and what’s already happening in the U.S.)
François listed some of the essential things to do to support each other and possibility in these times:
“We need to trust in ourselves and in each other, to trust in our values. This isn’t a negotiable thing. Then I think that there is a question of clarity. It’s an incredibly complicated world now, so many voices talking 17 to the dozen and trying to persuade us. By clarity I mean trying to remember what matters and what doesn’t. We sometimes get caught up in things that that are really inconsequential and we don’t notice or stand by the things that we should. We have limited energy. We have limited time. If we’re going to have to to do this work and support it by by doing other work to earn a living, then we have to be very sure that the work we can do really matters.
“The last two that I had were more practical. One is mutual aid. I believe fundamentally in solidarity. It’s always been central to this practice. It may well be that we can share resources. We can share premises. We can share partnerships. We can share networks and so on. Finally, some practical solutions. When we have tips, when we have workarounds, when we have solutions, when we have other ways of doing things, when we find cheaper alternative solutions, share them.”
Please listen to the whole episode, because there’s a lot more about what we see as needed now, and about our future plans for the podcast. We ended by inviting listeners to get in touch with us if there’s something that that you’re finding it inspiring, that you think other people should be able to read or see or talk about, or a person you want to meet on the podcast. Just drop me an email: [email protected]. And thanks for listening these last four years!
I love Al Green. Here’s his version of Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come.”
