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"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.

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.

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 <em>The Arts and the People</em>, Shaw wrote that: <blockquote>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.’</blockquote> 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.

Owen Kelly has written a new book called <em>Cultural Democracy Now</em>, 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 <em>Less Walk, More Talk - How Celtel and the Mobile Phone Changed Africa</em>, and with Kelly Wong, <em>Building a Data Ecosystem for Food Security and Sustainability, Agtech V3.0</em>. In this episode he talks with Owen Kelly about his recent book <em>Africa 2.0</em> 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 <em>Cards on the Table</em>, 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.

We have arrived at the first month of 2023 with five Fridays, and so we start another set of <strong>Friday Number Five</strong>. 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 <strong>Cultural Democracy & Cultural Policy</strong>, an article they wrote in issue 221 of Cultural Trends. They wrote that: <blockquote>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.</blockquote> The issues that Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly have with <strong>Cultural Democracy in Practice</strong> lie not in its intentions, which seem good-hearted if naive, but in its lack of any historical perspective, or any suggestion that <em>more sorts of art for more people</em> 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 <em>Terraform: Building a Better World</em>. 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 <a href="https:// miaaw.net">miaaw.net</a> 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 <em>One Size Does Not Fit All</em> (1993) and <em>What Kinda Name is That?</em> (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.