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.