A Culture of Possibility podcast #69: Giorgio Bacchiega on European Cultural Policy | Arlene Goldbard
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NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 69th episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” This episode will be available starting 16 October 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.
Giorgio Bacchiega lives in Milan, Italy, where he is Research Officer at Amateo, the only European Network to promote and advocate for active participation in arts and culture. Founded in 2008, it includes 45 national and regional umbrellas and associations from 22 European Union (EU) member states.
Read a bit of the organization’s description and you will instantly see how aligned the work is with François’ and my commitment to cultural democracy: “Amateo sees active participation in the arts as a core value for a free and open society as enshrined in Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Active participation in arts and cultural activities empowers individuals to freely express themselves and promotes cultural cohesion, social inclusion and active citizenship with an added value for humanistic and democratic values.”
Giorgio has been writing since March on Amateo’s site about two cultural policy documents: “Between September and November 2025, two documents set the terms of debate on the future of European cultural policy, revisiting the question of what roles culture is expected to play in European communities. The first, the Culture Compass: Sector Blueprint, emerged from an intensive summer of co-creation involving thirty organisations, including Amateo, coordinated by Culture Action Europe. The second, the Culture Compass, was issued by the European Commission as a formal communication outlining strategic directions at EU-level through 2034.” There are a dozen short essays written as part of “the policy landscape project.”)
If you’re a policy wonk like me, all the essays are worth reading, but I recommend starting with the first one, “Why the Active Participation Sector Should Engage With Policymaking.” It’s a message I’d like to see heeded by community-based artists and cultural democracy advocates across the globe. As Giorgio writes, their efforts to “create and gain recognition for what they do are channelled by regulatory logics that often remain invisible until their effects suddenly delimit what forms of engagement are deemed worthy of consideration.” In short, you can comfortably forget about engaging with cultural policy until it bites you on the butt. In every aspect of society—not just culture but health, environment, human rights, education, and so on—if the people who are the most fully engaged and care the most about the work’s health and future don’t have a direct hand in policymaking that shapes conditions for the work, others who don’t share their values and commitments will surely shape it to their own benefit.
As you read these essays, you’ll see that a thread runs through them: that cultural policies made for cultural institutions tend to measure value by outputs such as audience size, which doesn’t work for community-based arts. Co-creation is about processes much more than products and needs to be valued on its own terms, over time, with relationships and cultural citizenship in mind.
We talked to Giorgio about current European cultural policy work and what is to be learned from it. He pointed out that following the election of new EU leadership in 2024, he and others who share culturally democratic perspectives took part in creating policy documents. That brought him “inside the process of making cultural policy. It’s about co-creation. It’s about co-writing. It’s about exchanging ideas and trying to influence the policy landscape of the European Union. Please note that when I I speak about the European Union, I don’t mean Europe as a geopolitical continent. I mean the 27 countries that are part of this of this union. So their activities and their policymaking is dependent on the treaties that make the European Union possible. In cultural policy, the European Union has limited power because the EU cannot harmonize all cultural policies. It’s understandable to avoid one powerful country influencing the cultural policymaking of the smaller ones, but it can support and coordinate their action, and then then set common priorities or shape funding programs and bring culture into other areas of European policymaking. This is not the first time that the Commission devised strategy for culture. But this was pretty big thing, pretty unprecedented because it’s intended as a long-term strategy and a framework for how EU cultural policy will shape up in the years 2028-2034. It is an attempt to give culture a much more current place across the European project. The European Commission is telling us this is how we want culture to be understood across European policymaking, and these are the priorities we want to organize around.”
We asked Giorgio how he approached writing about these EU cultural policy documents. He explained that in trying to get his arms around it, he “had an original idea. What if I read these documents as fiction, as narratives? You have to set values, and characters meet. So there are institutions, there are labels like cultural democracy, participation, co-creation, and all of those characters meet and interact. Sometimes they have conflicts. Sometimes they just meet. Sometimes a particular character is forgotten and you want to know more, but you can’t because he is not in the story anymore. That helped me to approach this narrative way more relaxed.”
He explained that “policy documents establish what counts as a legitimate cultural practice. What is visible and what is invisible is a matter of debate before being made In practice. Since this Cultural Compass refers to cultural policies beginning in 2028, we have enough enough time to discuss it. I noticed that cultural policy tends to treat practice as a series of separate problems, each requiring a separate instrument. It’s like a collection of tales. I couldn’t help but think is that the way in which culture works? In my articles, I brought up the case of an imaginary choir that meets regularly to gather people and sing together.” He noted that the cultural policy convention is to say “‘this year is 2026, and we focus on cultural heritage. In 2027, we will focus on social cohesion, in 2028, we will focus on health and well-being,’ but I don’t think culture works this way. They don’t set social goals. They just sing together, and the rest flows naturally.”
François noted that who participates has a huge impact. “One of the things that that I thought when I looked at at the EU’s current work on culture is because it’s the EU, they have done a lot of consultation. Then you look at who they’ve consulted, and it’s sector organizations and member states. So it’s a conversation about culture, a policy formulation, which happens quite correctly through consultation, but the only mechanisms for participating in that is that you’re a interlocutor recognized by the European Union….
“If you look back 70 or 80 years, what strikes me is how the thinking remains consistent, and it’s consistent because the interlocutors are the same, and the interlocutors are the people who produce culture, not the people who participate in or consume culture. So therefore, the conceptual framework of cultural policy in Europe starts from the interests of the producers, and then citizens—to give them a better title—have to be organized in ways to fit the interests of the producers of culture. I understand why it’s both helpful and and quite possibly necessary for governments to think about the film industry or to think about museums or heritage in those kinds of terms. But it would be interesting if sometimes we thought about how people engage with culture.
“So you could look at participation in culture. You could look at entertainment, evenings out, days out. You could look at how people engage with culture in all kinds of different ways. What do they do online? What do they like to read? And then you would have lateral thinking compared to the kind of silo thinking that we have. The big problem with so much of this is partly that there is a closed conversation between government agencies and the producers of culture that doesn’t include the citizens. Related to that is that one of the reasons citizens would find it very difficult to take part in this conversation is because it’s largely happening in terms and using concepts that are very difficult for ordinary citizens to approach.”
Before Giorgio talked about how cultural policy could engage everyone to take part, I highlighted a point about measurement and evaluation that his essays had made. Using his example of a community choir that meets weekly, he noted that with the typical outcome-based evaluation framework of existing cultural policies, “that checks one box for cultural participation, and somebody who went to a theater performance one time checks another box, and they appear to be equal in the way that that information is gathered and interpreted. Many years ago, I worked for the California Arts Council, which is their cultural agency, and they were looking for a measurement like this. One of the counselors proposed ‘artist-client contact hours’ as the way that that you could prove that the work was valuable, and they did a lot of work around it until they realized that one person standing in front of an auditorium with a million people in it produced more artist-client contact hours than any kind of interactive or co-creative activity. So to add to what François said about the conceptualization of it, I would say the way it’s measured seems so important too.” In the podcast, Giorgio speaks clearly about what policymakers define as culture, how that determines what and how they measure, and how that skews the whole question of cultural participation.
Giorgio had a lot of interesting things to say about how these things ought to be done, such as pointing out linguistic biases: “Take a look at the vocabulary used, for instance, a policy document that speaks of reaching and delivering is imagining the participant as a recipient, someone who lives or stands outside culture, and needs to be brought into contact with it. That is something I see all the time in the peripheries of Milan. ‘We have to bring culture into the peripheries’ I say no. If you take a look at the peripheries, you can easily see a lot of forces operating inside.”
Tune in to this rich conversations to learn a great deal about culture, community, and policy.
“Sway,” by Chrissie Hynde and Lucinda Williams.
