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.

According to the ICAF website, "ICAF is a multi-trajectory, international program. We are at once a digital platform, a global network, and, every three years, an international festival that emerges in Rotterdam, showcasing community arts organisations, professionals, and practices from across the world. ICAF’s main goal is to offer space for reflection and development of the community arts movement, locally, nationally, and internationally.
Everything ICAF produces is built around the idea that community art is a worldwide, cutting edge and urgent arts movement – the only one of its kind. Furthermore, for ICAF, understanding the context behind each community arts practice is central to all that we do, to ensure we actively build bridges to communicate between differences in knowledge and experiences across social, economic, geographic, and political boundaries."
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly attended this year’s festival - ICAF 9 - with a view to meeting people and producing a series of podcasts to help capture the energy of the festival and help spread some of the ideas. In this first special ICAF edition of our podcast, Sophie and Owen meet in a room at one of the festival sites, on the last full day of the festival, to look back over what they have experienced.

We have arrived at the first month of 2023 with five Fridays, and so we start another set of Friday Number Five. 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 Cultural Democracy & Cultural Policy, an article they wrote in issue 221 of Cultural Trends. They wrote that:
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.
The issues that Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly have with Cultural Democracy in Practice lie not in its intentions, which seem good-hearted if naive, but in its lack of any historical perspective, or any suggestion that more sorts of art for more people 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 Terraform: Building a Better World. 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 miaaw.net 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.