Rural School of Economics at Scottish Sculpture Workshop

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.

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.

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.