On Culture of Possibility podcast #30, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard reflect on topics that are currently burning a hole in their brains:
Topics such as:
us vs. them;
what cultural democracy means and why some people can’t get it;
being a little braver.
Tune in and let us know what you think!

Hannah Kemp-Welch is a sound artist with a social practice. She creates works collaboratively and in community settings, often responding to social issues. Recent projects include ‘The Right to Record’ (2021) - a creative campaign with disabled activists, which successfully lobbied the Government to change a harmful clause within the benefits system; ‘Meet Me on the Radio’ (2020-21) - a weekly Resonance FM programme co-produced with elders isolated during lockdown; and ‘o-o-radio!’ (2023) - a project at Wysing Arts Centre, constructing homemade radios with d/Deaf young people, to better understand how hearing aids operate.
Hannah has a particular interest in transmission arts - she experiments with DIY radios and produces zines to make these technologies accessible. She is a member of feminist radio art group Shortwave Collective and arts cooperative Soundcamp, and has produced works for Radio Art Zone (2022), Movement Radio (2022), and Radiophrenia (2020-22).
In this episode Owen Kelly makes a genuine inquiry into the possible interfaces between feminism and ham radio.

According to the front page of their website, “Collective Encounters is a professional arts organisation specialising in theatre for social change through collaborative practice. We use theatre to engage those on the margins of society, telling untold stories and tackling the local, national and international concerns of our time.”
Sophie Hope talks with Annette Burghes, Aidan Jolly, and Marianne Matusz from Collective Encounters about their work, the provocations that they have organised, and the provocations they created for The World Transformed when it took place in Liverpool in September 2022.

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 The Arts and the People, Shaw wrote that:
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.’
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.

In this episode, Sophie Hope talks to Koh Hui Ling and Han Xuemei, co-artistic directors of the socially-engaged theatre company Drama Box in Singapore. "Founded in 1990, by Kok Heng Leun, Drama Box is a socially-engaged theatre company known for creating works that inspire dialogue, reflection and change. By shining a spotlight on marginalised narratives and making space for the communal contemplation of complex issues, it seeks to tell stories that provoke a deeper understanding of Singapore's culture, history and identity".
They discuss the nature of the organisation, its different aspects and projects, and their involvement in ICAF. They also reflect on the discussion about theatre of the oppressed during the panels they hosted in Rotterdam, and find out about their current work with young people and residents of a newly developed housing estate.

On Culture of Possibility podcast #29, listen to François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard interview members of TEAM from National Theatre Wales.
We talk with Natasha Borton, Anastacia Ackers, and Naomi Chiffi about two multi-year community projects: one in Wrexham and one in Pembrokeshire. These unfolded during COVID and engaged many hundreds of community members. One focused on nature and the environment, while the other focused on issues surrounding homelessness.
Both François and Arlene believe we can all learn a lot from the process they describe.

In early 2005, Pixelache Festival co-directors Juha Huuskonen & Petri Lievonen invited a representative of the young Wikimedia Foundation — Florence Devouard, from Paris, France — who came to present to Finnish electronic arts and sub-cultural practitioners, producers, and IT enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and media design students, the new WikiWiki way of open knowledge production. For the occasion, Pixelache had a Wikipedia page made in 2005 in Finnish.
Today it is still there, in one language, and the narrative stops in 2005.
In 2022 Pixelache began a process of renewing connections in the context of the long-term model of Wikimedians-in-residence that has been developed by the Wikimedia Foundation. The first stage of this concluded in March 2023 with the publication of 3 podcasts.
In this episode Andrew Gryf Paterson talks to Owen Kelly about the history of Pixelache’s involvement with Wikimedia, the idea of auto-archiving, various attempts to address Pixelache’s needs for archiving cultural activity as a core part of the activity itself, and the possibilities he believes lie ahead of us.

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.