In this episode Owen Kelly sits back while Sophie Hope shares some of her thoughts on participation and democracy.
She gives examples, some personal, of the ways in which participation can extend over time as well as space. She talks about the Joseph Beuys seminal work 7000 Acorns, and its afterlife as an inspiration to other participatory projects, some involving acorns and oaks.
Sophie draws inspiration from a series of articles and papers that are listed on the miaaw.net website and cover topics from policy making and gender politics to cultural policy in Chile and South Africa.

Most months have four Fridays, and we know what to do with them. We put out a podcast: a different but related one for each Friday in the month.
Sometimes, however, a month has five fridays, and then we have to think again. We put out an episode of our occasional series, designed for just this purpose. This, then, is the first episode of Friday Number Five.
Owen Kelly looks at (and listens to) the very first sound recordings ever made and then asks how they turned into public radio, and what we might consider the funniest radio sketch of all time.
We then find out what all this has to do with cultural democracy.

According to their website “RESHAPE is a research and development project that brings together arts organisations from the Europe and the South Mediterranean to jointly create innovative organisational models and reflect on concrete answers to crucial challenges related to the production, distribution and presentation of contemporary art practices.
“The aim of RESHAPE is to imagine an alternative to the European arts ecosystem by rethinking its instruments and collaborative models, placing them in line with artistic and social innovation and the principles of fairness, solidarity, geographic balance and sustainability”.
In this episode Sophie Hope talks with Helga Baert, Martin Schick, and Sam Trotman about Reshape and the governance of cultural organisations.

In the fourth episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and Francois Matarasso compare U.S. and European funding systems for community arts. In this discussion they are not interested in who gets funding and whether that funding is deserved. Nor are they concerned with where funding goes. Instead they focus on the underlying bases for making funding decisions in the first place.
They find that both the American and European systems are way too focused on the wrong questions, with results that are politically, ethically, and culturally problematic.
How did this happen? What would be better?
Francois and Arlene have both written a great deal about questions of cultural policy and cultural funding over many years. This discussion can only scratch the surface of their thinking. If you are interested in what they have to say then you should check their websites for articles and links.

This episode begins a trilogy of audio essays concerned with the work of Marshall McLuhan and its continuing relevance in the digital age.
In this first essay, entitled Understanding McLuhan, Owen Kelly offers a brief introduction to McLuhan’s life and work. He offers a potted biography and a quick run through his six most celebrated books, including Laws of Media, edited by his son Eric, and published eight years after his death.
He also sets the stage for the second episode by looking briefly at several of McLuhan’s key concepts from the medium is the message to media tetrads.

The availability (or unavailability) of covid-19 vaccines has become an international issue. Some people have begun asking the extent to which the problems in the supply chains stem from the proprietary nature of the vaccines and the need for exclusivity that this promotes.
At the same time a group of scientists in Finland have developed a nasal spray that they claim will prove cheaper, more effective, much easier to administer, and much easier to upgrade to deal with new variants of the virus. They have developed it as an open-source vaccine and they have found it difficult to find the funding to put it through the necessary Stage 3 tests.
In this episode of Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly discuss some of the issues surrounding the idea of open source vaccines, and the systemic issues they reveal when we start to think about them.

For over three decades, Numbi Arts has been at the forefront of archiving British Somali heritage and has become a significant part of the East London cultural scene. Last year, the organization lost its residency and is currently crowd-funding in order to secure a permanent home for their work.
In this episode of Common Practice Sophie Hope talks with Kinsi Abdulleh, who founded Numbi Arts, and Hudda Khaireh, an independent researcher who is currently an associate there.
They discuss their work, their ambitions and achievements, what drives them, and their plans to create a Somali Museum in East London to document the history of Somali-British arts and culture.

In the third episode of “A Culture of Possibility,” Francois Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard meet Clare Reynolds, one of the founders of Restoke, a group who make performances and events that tackle social issues affecting their communities.
Based in the British city of Stoke-on-Trent, where the founders grew up, Restoke’s work pursues an ambitious agenda in both its artistic and social purpose.
In the conversation Clare describes their work, with particular reference to two recent works: You Are Here and Man Up. She talks about what they do and why they do it and equally importantly, how they do it.
She also discusses The Ballroom, a project that began in December 2020 when “we received a capital grant from Arts Council England to restore and reopen the Ballroom at Fenton Town Hall as a brand new community arts venue for Stoke-on-Trent!”.