Ana Laura López de la Torre talks us through the ‘extensión’ function of the Universidad de la República with details of a current project.
François Matarasso & Arlene Goldbard talk to Carol Bebelle, cofounder of Ashé Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans.
Owen Kelly looks at the lessons we can learn from Bhimrao Ambedkar, Dalit anti-caste campaigner & writer of most of the Indian constitution.
François Matarasso on Orcadian culture: “the unique creation of interaction between people and place, coming and going, over centuries”.
Ana Laura López de la Torre discusses the history and democratic structures of the Universidad de la República, Uruguay, with Sophie Hope.
Yuriy Vulkovsky talks about his decades of experience working with communities and institutions in Bulgaria and nearby states.
Ken Worpole and Owen Kelly inquire into the nature of social experiments in living, ranging from self-invented communes to garden cities that arise from philanthropy and public policy.
François Matarasso discusses music and social change. He argues that the “social outcomes – a word I prefer to impact – of music making are real, complex and profound. They can be transformative, even life changing. They are not, however, only positive.”
We go back to June 3, 1956 to listen to an episode of the western series Gunsmoke. A pacifist arrives in town pursued by two men who want to kill him.
Beverley Harvey & Brendan Jackson, co-founders of the Jubilee Archive project, discuss the archive, its purposes, and its future.
François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard discuss power in the context of cultural institutions.
Owen Kelly inquires into the heated arguments between proponents of the germ theory and the terrain theory of disease transmission.
François Matarasso discusses the differences between folk culture and heritage and how we might safeguard our intangible heritage.
Arlene Tucker explains her practice and her decision to turn her house into a project where people can stay, play and work.
Joe Lambert talks with Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso about Storycenter.
In this episode Owen Kelly expands on a lecture he first presented at the Max Planck Society in Hamburg to inquire into the nature of the metaverse and ask what Meta actually has in mind for us.
François Matarasso argues that “The values and practices of contemporary European culture are still defined by ideas that emerged during the Enlightenment, and the period of industrialisation and imperialism with which it is associated.”
We go back to June 21, 1950 to listen to episode 15 of 2000 Plus & learn about the future that people in the 1950s looked forward to.
Delving into the Miaaw archives we catch Sophie Hope talking with Sally Labern, an artist and activist living and working in north London.
Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk with David Ramy and Bruno Homem of SAMP in Portugal about co-creating original opera with incarcerated youth.
Owen Kelly looks at some aspects of the relationships between cultural democracy and politics and the importance of the idea of a “democracy of species” that moves culture away from the Western idea of “Man vs Nature” and towards a cultural democracy that grows from the earth.
François Matarasso contrasts the childhoods of today’s children with his own. He looks at what children gain from the arts and the ways in which politicians have contrived to limit this access and the amount of stimulation it can provide. He ends with a plea for increased involvement, but on children’s own terms.
Owen Kelly talks to Helga Baert and Dušica Dražić, 2 members of the wpZimmer collective in Antwerp, about wpZimmer & the project Topoi 2022.
Arlene Goldbard and Francois Matarasso ask what has gone wrong with “best practices?” What role does risk aversion play in funding? What about the underlying class biases that shape funding?
Owen Kelly asks how culture and economics relate to each other, and what we might actually do to foster economic equity and cultural democracy.
François Matarasso reads The Art of Uncertainty, an from 2010 that considers how the arts might respond to an era characterised by a sense of uncertainty.
In January 2022 Agnieszka Pokrywka spent two weeks in the Utah desert in a simulator designed to provide an analog of a Martian settlement as part of a multi-disciplinary crew.
Arlene Goldbard and Francois Matarasso talk with Dave Loewenstein about the strength of the US mural movement, the centrality of place, the challenge of supporting the work, and much more.
Owen Kelly asks how culture and community relate to each other, and what we might actually do to foster community and cultural democracy.
Francois Matarasso reads Prisoners of Love, an extract from a book called Where We Dream, published in 2012 by Multistorey.
On October 31, 1938 Orson Welles broadcast an version of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds”: one of the great media hoaxes of the 20th century.
Sophie Hope, Lizzie Lloyd and Katy Beinart recorded a live conversation at a public event to launch Acts of Transfer.
Arlene Goldbard and Francois Matarasso talk with Lucy Wright, a visual artist, artistic researcher, writer, and contemporary folk artist.
Owen Kelly asks what might we mean when we talk about cultural democracy? Why might people need the term, and what can they do with it?
Francois Matarasso reads Making Nothing Happen, a talk he first gave in September 2016. He has revised it in the light of current events.
Arlene Goldbard, Owen Kelly Francois Matarasso talk policy for cultural democracy, taking off from the Porto Santo Charter
Sophie Hope expands upon her contribution to a forthcoming book called The Failures of Public Art and Participation.
Francois Matarasso analyses his initial reactions to hearing Eric Burdon singing House of the Rising Sun with the Animals as a child.
Sophie Hope and Jack Keenan interview Shama Khanna about their project Flatness.eu
David Slater and Alan Lyddiard talk with Arlene Goldbard & François Matarasso about Art With The Experience of Age.
Owen Kelly asks what relevance the social mind hypothesis has for those interested in developing a coherent theory of cultural democracy.
Sophie Hope talks with Gretchen Coombs about her new book, The Lure of the Social.
Owen Kelly talks with Abhijit Sinha about how Project Defy has coped with the devastation that the Covid-19 pandemic has caused across India.
Arlene Goldbard talks with California-based visual artist Cynthia Tom, creator of A Place of One’s Own.
Ellis Brooks wrote an article on Medium claiming that “NFTs Are Critical for the Future of Art”. Owen Kelly inquires into the premises of her argument and the remedy she proposes.
Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope discuss Solidarity Not Charity, by Nati Linares and Caroline Woolard. As so often, this leads to a wider discussion.
Owen Kelly looks at common practices that occur in Christmas celebrations while Vera Vestmann Kristjánsdóttir explains the very different practices in Iceland.
Co-host François Matarasso returns to talk with Arlene Goldbard about the first year of A Culture of Possibility.
Copyright from the invention of printing in 1476 to the creation of the Berne Convention in 1886, and where it all went wrong.
Jo Coleman talks with Sophie Hope about her new book “Digital Innovations and the Production of Local Content in Community Radio: Changing Practices in the UK”.
Owen Kelly introduces the first anniversary episode of Ferment Radio, featuring Tosca Terán, and discusses it with Agnieszka Pokrywka.
Jan Cohen-Cruz and Rad Pereira have curated stories from over 75 interviews and informal exchanges that offer insight into the field of Socially Engaged Performance in the United States over the past 55 years.
Owen Kelly outlines Mike Ananny’s concept of networked information algorithms, & reflects on both the ideas behind it and their utility.
Owen Kelly and David Morley discuss Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century written by Christian Caryl and published in 2014.
This month contains five Fridays and so on Friday Number Five we continue an irregular series of podcasts of music issued under Creative Commons licences: this time we have music to think about as autumn fades into winter.
Timo Cantell works as the director of the Urban Research and Statistics Unit of the City of Helsinki, a unit of 35 people within the city council charged with gathering data, and publishing it in ways that the citizens of Helsinki can use.
In this episode Timo Cantell talks with Owen Kelly about the ways in which the city approaches the collection, distribution and publication of public data, and the tools it uses to make it open.
Arlene Goldbard talks with Gary Stewart, an artist and experimental sonic musician based in London.
Sophie Hope reflects on what the term “socially engaged research” might mean. She discusses issues of consent, power relations, and trust.
Owen Kelly offers two surprises and a look back at Clive Sinclair and the impact of the ZX Spectrum, which ushered in a brief period of democratic bedroom coding.
Rob Watson runs projects using radio and podcasting to facilitate community development and empower people to tell their own stories.
Arlene Goldbard talks with Meena Natarajan, Artistic and Executive Director of Pangea World Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Chrissie Orr, community artist and cofounder of Seed Broadcast in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Owen Kelly explores the consequences of Facebook’s declared intention to build the metaverse and the deeper problems of “virtual reality”.
Sophie Hope and Jonathan Gross discuss the relationship between autobiography and cultural action, and the needs to explore memory and history as a means of making sense of one’s own cultural politics. They also ask whether we should see cultural democracy as a kind of practice or a demand for systemic change.
{openradio} describe themselves as “a platform to support independently produced open-content audio streams and provide listeners with a way to find this content”.
Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk with Bermudian artist Bill Ming in his studio in Nottinghamshire, England. Bill’s work in sculpture, assemblage, painting, and collage draws on the whole of personal and collective history, from the racism he faced growing up in segregated schools to his reponse to the death of George Floyd, from childhood toys to the blues to the Middle Passage.
Owen Kelly has held a number of workshops in Helsinki exploring ways of making industrialised products at home. In this episode he looks at the different approaches to replacing meat before returning to the vexing question of why most vegan cheese tastes disgusting.
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly discuss the reasons that 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, when Roy Shaw at the Arts Council of Great Britain began to try to paint them as quaint missionaries.
This episode we continue an irregular series of podcasts of music issued under Creative Commons licences: music to listen to during the summer heatwave.
A year or so ago we talked to Monika Dutta and Jake Harries about A Little Piece of Land. Today their project seems even more relevant than it did then, and so this week we revisit that discussion to look again at the ups and downs of rewilding.
In the seventh episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk about the explosion of story-based work in community and participatory arts and what it all means.
Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope discuss G.D.H. Cole’s book Guild Socialism Restated and inquire into the relevance guild socialism might have for debates about cultural democracy today.
As summer 2021 approaches we take stock of some of the core concerns fuelling the MIAAW podcasts: the ideas behind cultural democracy
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly talk with Steven Hadley about his latest book, called Audience Development and Cultural Policy, published by Palgrave MacMillan.
In the sixth episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and Francois Matarasso interview Jade Campbell and Erin Walcon of Doorstep Arts in Torbay, England.
For the last year Owen Kelly has worked on developing a rapid learning process to enable students to improve their soft skills.
The has raised a number of interesting and difficult questions. In this episode Owen Kelly pursues a genuine inquiry into what we might mean by soft skills, and why we might find ourselves concerned with them.
Owen Kelly talks to Sophie Hope and Henry Mulhall. He wants to know what the Be Part project aims to do, and how Sophie and Henry intend to carry out their evaluation of it.
Owen Kelly talks with Hafdís Björg Hjálmarsdóttir and Vera K Vestmann Kristjánsdóttir from the School of Business and Science at the University of Akureyri, a city of 20,000 people in the north of Iceland, about the reasons for the Icelandic investment in culture, and the participatory nature of cultural activities there.
In the fifth episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and Francois Matarasso interview Denise Griffin Johnson, a cultural organizer in West Baltimore on the east coast of the U.S. She talks about racial justice, building on community strengths instead of deficits, the “highway to nowhere” and more.
This episode continues a trilogy of audio essays concerned with the work of Marshall McLuhan and its continuing relevance in the digital age. In this episode Owen Kelly looks at what McLuhan means by “the electric age”.
In this episode Owen Kelly sits back while Sophie Hope explains some of her thoughts on participation and democracy.
Listen to the very first sound recordings ever made and ask how they turned into public radio. Then find out what all this has to do with cultural democracy.
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.
This episode begins a trilogy of audio essays concerned with the work of Marshall McLuhan and its continuing relevance in the digital age.
The availability (or unavailability) of covid-19 vaccines has become an international issue. In this episode 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 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.
This episode concludes Sophie Hope’s trilogy of audio essays, each looking at a different aspect of cultural democracy in contemporary professional practice.
In this episode Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope wrap up last month’s discussion about Gamestop and move on to look at a newer internet phenomenon: Clubhouse.
Sophie Hope and Jenny Richards started Manual Labours in 2013 as a research project exploring our physical and emotional relationships to work. The Global Staffroom grew out of this, and Owen Kelly talks to them about it.
In the second episode of “A Culture of Possibility,” Francois Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard talk with Amber Hansen and Reyna Hernandez, community muralists in South Dakota, USA.
In this audio essay Sophie Hope inquires into the digital while thinking about processes of evaluation.
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly experience the post-truth society and talk about the ongoing Gamestop furore.
Agnieszka Pokrywka has a long-standing interest in fermentation and we talk to her about Ferment Lab in Helsinki, and its spin-off Ferment Radio.
Hosted by Arlene Goldbard and Francois Matarasso, this monthly podcast explores people, projects, and topics that expand possibility and choice through cultural work.
In the first episode of Genuine Inquiry, our new monthly audio essay, Sophie Hope examines the relationship between money, culture and democracy.
Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse returns from a four month siesta with renewed vigour, a review of the past twelve months, and a clearer set of long term objectives, which include creating a community and releasing a podcast every week during 2021.
With this episode Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse reaches its fiftieth episode, and its final episode in its current form. Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly look back at what started them on this journey, and their plans for the future.
These involve splitting the twice-monthly podcast into three, and (before the end of this year) four separate but linked weekly podcasts, while expanding the website into a community forum.
In Episode 40 we looked at a variety of pop, rock and folk music licensed through a Creative Commons licence, or made freely available.
In this episode we look at four other, quite different, musics made available in this way.
Karine Gilanyan plays the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata number 15 in D Major. Jahzzar plays the self-composed Fibonacci from his album kontra-punkte. Bob Ostertag performs Arms and Legs. Julie Licata presents her work resound.
In this episode Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly talk with Loraine Leeson about her work, and begin by discussing her latest book: Art : Process : Change, which Routledge published in September 2019.
Loraine discusses her work from the 1970s onwards, and talks in particular about the twelve year Active Energy project with The Geezers.