A Selfless Art

Rethinking co-creation

Community art or co-creation?

15.3.2026

Last Friday, Arlene Goldbard and I recorded an episode of our podcast. Mostly, we have guests but about a third of the podcasts are just conversations between us, and this is one of those. It should be available next week, on 20 March.

We talked about co-creation, and why I have recently been using the term. For many years I doggedly described my work as community art, partly because that term came out of a body of grounded theory and practice in the 1960s and 1970s that I still believe to be valid, and partly because the phrase is understood by the people I work with. If I invite someone to be part of a community art project, they usually have a good idea of what I mean, even if it’s not exactly the same as mine.

So why start using the term co-creation? One reason is that it’s more meaningful in other cultures and languages: in fact, so untranslatable is it that community art is used directly in the Netherlands and Sweden. Another reason is that co-creation describes what actually happens when I’m working on an arts project with other people: it’s more precise than community art, which can mean almost anything.

But perhaps the most important is that reading and thinking about co-creation has helped me challenge my own ideas and practices. The change in language is part of a recognition that my understanding of my own field of work, as set out in A Restless Art, was inadequate and in some senses naive. I want to address those gaps and limitations in A Selfless Art. I stand by what I’ve written in the past, especially in terms of its values, processes and outcomes. The definition of community art I gave in A Restless Art is the same as the one I now use to describe co-creation:

‘The creation of art as a human right, by professional and non-professional artists, co-operating as equals, for purposes and to standards they set together, and whose processes, products and outcomes cannot be known in advance.’

François Matarasso, 2019, A Restless Art

I stand by it, but it’s not enough. I need to enlarge and balance what I wrote in 10 or 20 years ago with other ideas and new interpretations. That is the project I’m calling A Selfless Art.

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5 responses to “Community art or co-creation?”

maximumstrangere79cca86e9

2026.03.15

I do like co-creation Francois but I think that community art is more specific. Co-creation is often used in my environment here in New Zealand/Aotearoa to describe people working together to codesign new ways of thinking about or doing things that may have nothing to do with the arts. We cocreate new practice, policy, approaches etc….

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1. François Matarasso
  
  2026.03.15
  
  You’re quite right – co-creation is certainly a problematic term. Because of its origins in neoliberal consumer economics, it can be exploitative and extractive. But lots of words have complex meanings and interpretations that are shaped by a person’s perspective: family can feel warm to one person and dangerous to another. One of the tasks I want to fulfil in the book is to outline the complexities of the term and make it possible to use it in a constructive way. And I will never stop using the term community art
  
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theatreofopportunity

2026.03.15

Thanks for sharing this shift in your thinking Francois. When I fell out with Augusto Boal, (a long time ago and another conversation to have) having been a disciple of his for a long time, I went on a similar journey.
It wasn’t until I understood, intrinsically and emotionally what I knew Art to be, that I was able to shift my ideas of what community or participatory or placemaking or applied or (insert word here)ART is and can be, that I found my path to a selfless art. I had instinctively been practicing it but realised I was working within a dogma and constraints of a political and economic system that demanded we applied art and measured it. It also demanded we be measured by our practice of it- through logic or story or log frame impact and outputs theories of change(curiously never the art itself.). I went in search for an alternative- one that I knew to be true coz I felt it all my life. When I got in tow with Eric Booth he lit a light that shone on the bits I couldn’t quite reach myself. Art for arts sake is dead he said. Artistry is what we do and its the verbs of art that matter.” I found a new voice and a new path, but quickly recognised that the same western hegemony was the backdrop to an alternative articulation of the practice we all share. There was still something I couldn’t quite square. I disagreed that art for arts sake was dead, because my intrinsic knowledge and appreciation of art was not the commodified and rarefied hierarchical kind, it was the discovery of the artists intention and the found expression in communities and theatres and choirs and children and play and and and…. It didn’t polarise art into object and subject or high or low or community or professional. I was on a new journey that led me to my Theatre of Opportunity and The Necessary Space. A journey towards an art that lives inside and outside of you and that is in superposition until it is created and its potential realised by being observed and shared. The position of the “artist” and the “community” or “co-creator” seem to me to be the same . They are connected/entangled in a potential for Art and they do it through artistry- open, playful,togetherness. So it is really important to know what we mean by art, not just its adjective. The etymology of art is about “putting things together,” the noun is about the verb. For me art is connecting anything outside our knowledge, or understanding, our conscious or unconscious bias and experiencing it or expressing it through an aesthetic form. Artistry is being open, connected and in search of something beyond our singular experience of the world. It is in the coming together that the entanglement is released into a form of art and art form. In short I think a selfless art is about connection. It is in connection that we are relevant and are able to co create. It is in connection we can reflect and be reflected, that our potential is observed as entangled consciousness. In surrendering to the superposition we make the reality. We have been slave or subjects to dogma and rational capitalist western hegemony for a long time. Being free from this opens a world of spiritual realms of experience and expression. I write this and immediately hesitate to use this word, for fear of its impact on the reader, but why should I fear when I know Indigenous and eastern societies have this as foundations to being and we are sadly lacking it. Being free and finding that selfless space, is a path to enlightenment of a spiritual and rational kind. Ian McGilchrists book ” The Master and His Emissary” is well worth reading. It maps epochs where the art shifts from rational to spiritual and influences everything. Another thing to watch on your journey to a selfless art, is Terence Mckennas lecture on “Opening the doors to creativity” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzIUNQ9HxzU. If you can overcome the stigma and bias surrounding his association with mind altering drugs, he makes a brilliant point about the place of artists in society, who practice selfless arts.
I’m still exploring this and still finding little lights and sometimes lightening storms on the journey. I look forward to more of your flames.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts and journey so generously and forgive me for this stream of consciousness. I offer it as a humble cup of water for a restless traveller on a road to selfless discovery.

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1. François Matarasso
  
  2026.03.15
  
  Thanks for such a rich reflection, Simon: it’s a lot to come out of one short blog post, and a lot for me to think about. I won’t try to respond to it now, except to thank you for the threads you’ve given me to follow; I hope we’ll have a chance to talk about some of these ideas before too long. I’m intrigued by your experience with Augusto Boal: I only met once, over dinner, but I was too young and naive to draw much from the experience.
  
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Geraldine Ling

2026.03.15

I have worked as a community arts worker who has been inspired by Francois Matarasso so read Community Art or Co-creation with interest. The word co-creation feels like a very useful way of thinking about something many of us have been doing for years, even if we didn’t always name it that way.

Being a community artist suggests both working with people and community and also wonder whether co-creator might describe our work more accurately. Community artist works easily as an answer when asked “what do you do?” Co-creator is less straightforward as it describes a process rather than a profession, a way of working.

Maybe we need more words, different phrases that can understood by international communities and new thinking which reflect collective creative ways of responding to these strange and challenging times.

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