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NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 62nd episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” This episode will be available starting 20 March 2026. You can find it and all episodes at 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 Podbean and find links to accompany the podcasts.
Co-creation is a topic very near and dear to François’ heart and important to me as well. The roots of this conversation go back to when we first met, early in 2017. He asked me to send him some information about community-based arts work in the USA, and that started a conversation that hasn’t stopped yet. By “met,” I mean exchanged emails and had a Zoom conversation. When you read this we will just have met in person for the very first time, as we’ll be on our way to the subject of our previous podcast, the International Community Arts Festival in Rotterdam, which starts on 25 March.
Back in 2017, François was writing his book A Restless Art, which has gained a wide readership since it was published in 2019. You can download a free PDF copy here. I asked him to start by telling listeners a bit about that book, as the writing François is now doing on co-creation has in many ways evolved from that project.
François noted that it’s his habit to think in public when he’s working on a book. “I like thinking in public because it’s kind of the same principle as community art, which is demystifying the process of thinking and of writing and saying, it’s not a magical thing, it’s just something that I do, and I do it with other people. I don’t do it with other people in the same room at the same time, but the thinking and the ideas develop out of experience and conversations and so on.” He’s doing it right now with his forthcoming book project, A Selfless Art, which you’ll find here.
“The subtitle of A Restless Art was How Participation Won and Why It Matters,” François continued. “I decided I had to use the term participatory arts in that book, although the term that I have always used and preferred was community art. I have stuck with community art, although it became very unfashionable as a term. By the 1990s most people in the UK did not want to be associated with community art. So the term participatory art emerged, and I accepted it as a big catch-all for all of the artwork with people, but I reserved the term community art for the specific work with people that I was interested in, and I gave definitions of both of those terms in the book. My reason for for sticking with community art was because I had always believed that the the term was based on a set of philosophical and artistic thinking that came out of the 1960s and 70s, particularly in the UK, but also in France and elsewhere, and that thinking was solid and it meant something. It still does mean something, whereas participatory art is is too loose and vague and and floppy a term. It means whatever people want it to mean, so it can become very self-serving.
“Now I have come to to use the term co-creation for two reasons, really. One is that it is more international in the sense that it works in more languages. Community art really doesn’t work everywhere. I live in France, and it specifically doesn’t work here because there is a concept that there is only one community, which is the national community, and that to talk of communities is to be divisive. So co-creation is a is a word that works in a in a lot of languages, but even more importantly than that, it describes what is actually happening, whereas community art is a kind of label for a field of work, but it doesn’t tell you what that field of work is. Co-creation is useful because it does describe what is happening. And when I looked back, I found I used the word co-creation a lot in A Restless Art, but I used it quite naively. I’ve since done a lot of thinking and reading and researching and talking with people about what that word means. Part of the rethinking has led me to believe, not that A Restless Art is wrong, or what I wrote in A Restless Art is wrong, but I think that it’s incomplete. Some parts of it are naive and too optimistic.”
I explained that a main distinction for me is that “co-creation, describing a process, is more egalitarian, more leveling. When I hear the word, I see a circle of people facing each other. Everyone’s pitching in. Everyone has a part. They’re not necessarily identical, but whatever emerges is a collective emergence, and I like that shift. I haven’t used it as much as you. Maybe this episode is going to change my language. I usually say what we say in the US more often, which is community-based arts, the idea that it emerges for, by, and with a community of some nature.
“The thing that pops up for me when I think about that difference is that so many people I know didn’t really work that way. They involve people in their work, but they were the sole credited artist. They were the driver of whatever the process was. The work I’m about to refer to is by very well-known artists who don’t necessarily call themselves community artists, but they do some kind of participatory creation. The feeling is other people are like paintbrushes or pigments or something that the artist deploys to accomplish something that’s thought out in advance. There’s been a lot of controversy about that. I remember lots of stuff about Judy Chicago’s work, “The Dinner Party,” where many, many women created needlework that was part of a big installation, sparking lots of conversation about ownership, economic benefit, and credit. So co-creation is good because it puts a fine point on it. If someone says, ‘my work is co-creation,’ you’re assuming that they’re following certain basic guidelines of what that means. If you find out they aren’t, then you have an argument.”
That led us to the basic question of what co-creation actually means. Here’s the definition François uses:
Co-creation is the creation of art as a human right by professional and non-professional artists cooperating as equals for purposes and to standards they set together and whose processes and products and outcomes cannot be known in advance.
In the episode, François explains each element of this definition and I offer a few quibbles that don’t affect the basic understanding, but as I said, “blur the categories a little.” He also describes his research into the term’s use by business awhile back, in which co-creation had a very shallow definition focusing on consumer engagement in creating and marketing products. “When I read some of that writing,” he explained, “I was really shocked by how cynical and exploitative it was. It was basically extractive. It was like a kind of colonial mindset, a way of thinking that that simply seemed to to see customers as people you could get ideas from, and then you could then sell those ideas back to them once you’d incorporated them into your products and services. So there’s a very questionable side to the idea of co-creation, and I would say that some of the work in participatory art is exactly similar.”
Tune into our give-and-take to go deeper into this concept and to hear something about how it may land differently in the U.S. and Europe. Among other things, we talked about the two paths to working in community-based arts I often see in this country—art school grads who decide they want their work to have more resonance and connection than a standard professional arts career offers; and activists and organizers who make art and come to see that as integral to their work and their mission in life.
François stressed the importance of power relations in understanding co-creation. “Co-creation,” he said, “always involves negotiations about power between people who, almost by definition, don’t have the same degrees of power in what they’re doing. When I say power, I mean it in a very wide sense: power to make decisions, but also power in the sense of skills, of knowledge, knowing things, confidence, social position, all kinds of aspects that give people power.” He talked about a co-created opera project that showed him some of the challenges. That inspired me to bring up power as it’s manifested beyond the co-creators of an arts project, such as for the members of a community that hosts a mural depicting some aspect of history or contemporary life. To me, the authenticating audience for such work includes those live with it, who walk by it every day. In contrast, some participatory or social practice work defines the authenticating audience as the people who see the photo documentation hanging on the walls or a museum or gallery, not at all the same thing.
We think you’ll enjoy this episode, so please tune in and let us know your response.
Here’s a blast from a very distant past, Lizz Wright’s version of the Youngbloods’ “Get Together.”
