Arlene Goldbard and Francois Matarasso join forces with Owen Kelly to talk policy for cultural democracy with Owen Kelly, taking off from the Porto Santo Charter adopted last year as part of Portugal's Presidency of the Council of the European Union.
Who are such statements for?
What impact can they have?
How should they be done?

Sophie Hope has just written a contribution to a book called The Failures of Public Art and Participation. In this episode she expands upon some of the arguments in her chapter, We Thought We Were Going To Change The World: socially engaged art and cruel optimism.
She bases her analysis on a reading of Laurent Berlant’s book Cruel Optimism and uses a long running work of her own, the 1984 Dinners, as the starting point for a practical look at how we might thrive through solidarity in the face of the frustrations of our cruel optimism.

In this episode Francois Matarasso reads some Old Words that he wrote a long time ago, and feels have become relevant to him and us once more.
He analyses his initial reactions to hearing Eric Burdon singing House of the Rising Sun with the Animals as a child, and this leads him to look at wider and deeper questions about what constitutes music, and what how we might describe its effects and purposes.
As part of the Old Words series within a series, Francois will make the printed version of this essay available for download as a pdf at his Parliament of Dreams website at the same time as this podcast appears online.
Multimedia!

In the 14th episode of A Culture of Possibility, co-hosts François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard interview two accomplished makers of theater with older performers — David Slater (founder and now associate member of Entelechy Arts in South London) and Alan Lyddiard (Artistic Director of The Performance Ensemble in Leeds).
They share their stories, describe their processes in helping to create new forms of theater that serve the people they work with rather than imposing conventional forms that leave them out, and talk about the people and work that have inspired them. Alan explained that "I don't find much interest going to the theater, and seeing the well-made play anymore. I find it dull, mostly. But I find it exceptionally rewarding to be on the streets of a city and see the people working away doing what they do, and being creative in their daily lives. And that's the bit that I would like to capture and try to get hold of and try to work with and get to know better."

In 2015 Thames & Hudson published a book called “Thinking Big: how the evolution of social life shaped the human mind”. The book had three authors: Robin Dunbar, head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group at the University of Oxford; Clive Gamble, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton; and John Gowlett, Professor of Archaeology at Liverpool University.
The book developed out of a seven year research study called “Lucy to Language: The Archaeology of the Social Brain” and argues in favour of the social mind hypothesis. Simply put this states that “a link has always existed between our brains, or more precisely the size of our brains, and the size of our basic social units. We see this link as essential to understanding our evolution as a single, global species that can live in cities the size of Rio de Janeiro, drawing daily on vast amounts of information to manage our lives”.
In this episode of A Genuine Inquiry Owen Kelly asks what relevance the social mind hypothesis has for those interested in developing a coherent theory of cultural democracy.

Gretchen Coombs works as a writer and researcher with a focus on socially engaged art practices in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. She also has a postdoctoral research fellowship in design and creative practice at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.
Her new book, The Lure of the Social, acts as a creative practice ethnography, which navigates a spectrum where at one end the author works closely with socially engaged artists as part of her ethnographic research, and at the other she tries to find a critical distance to write about their art projects and the institutional structures that support their work, such as art schools and conferences.
Over the course of the book, Coombs introduces readers to artists and their work, and to the key debates and issues facing this fast-growing and emergent field. She navigates the contradictions and paradoxes of this field of practice through description and analysis and, importantly, gives voice to the artists who are working to make art relevant in times of social and political uncertainty.etchen Coombs works as a writer and researcher with a focus on socially engaged art practices in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. She also has a postdoctoral research fellowship in design and creative practice at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.
Her new book, The Lure of the Social, acts as a creative practice ethnography, which navigates a spectrum where at one end the author works closely with socially engaged artists as part of her ethnographic research, and at the other she tries to find a critical distance to write about their art projects and the institutional structures that support their work, such as art schools and conferences.
Over the course of the book, Coombs introduces readers to artists and their work, and to the key debates and issues facing this fast-growing and emergent field. She navigates the contradictions and paradoxes of this field of practice through description and analysis and, importantly, gives voice to the artists who are working to make art relevant in times of social and political uncertainty.

We have spoken with Abhijit Sinha and Megha Sharma before. They founded Project Defy, based in Bangalore, and dedicated to creating new types of learning spaces in which members of a community can come together and decide what they want to learn for themselves.
In this episode Owen Kelly talks with Abhijit about how Project Defy has coped with the devastation that the Covid-19 pandemic has caused across India. We talk about their rapid changes in approach including their digital and phone-based program FLITE, where Defy facilitators spoke with families over the phone and helped them organize learning at home while in lockdown. We also discuss two other programs that developed or changed radically during the pandemic: DASH and DISPECS.

In the 13th episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard talks with California-based visual artist Cynthia Tom, creator of A Place of One’s Own, “An art-making and exhibition-based organization dedicated to sparking the transformation of women from heartache to resilience.”
They talk about patterns of trauma arising for Asian American and other immigrant women and how art can help to heal them, patriarchy, colonization, and intergenerational relationships.
Cohost François Matarasso is taking a break and will be back in coming months.