Co-creation is

A Selfless Art

This site follows the evolution of a book that develops and rebalances my last, A Restless Art . Its concern is the practice of co-creation, as I have known it. A Selfless Art complements and completes its brother, yin to its yang, moon to its sun, dark to its light. Subjective, imperfect and incomplete, it is personal, final and open-ended; it might never be finished or published.

François Matarasso, August 2026

  • The artwork in co-creation

    The relationship between the process and the product has been debated throughout my working life. Many of the community artists with whom I’ve worked placed process first, sometimes to the extent of disregarding product entirely, but they are both important… more ›

  • What I do (1)

    I’m not an artist. I can do art, as anyone can who wants to. I’m quite good at thinking about art, in a limited way, focused on content more than form. I have no mastery of form, and only an… more ›

  • Italo Calvino on listening

    ‘I speak and speak,’ Marco says, ‘but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. […] It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.’ Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities I am reminded of this truth… more ›

  • Brian Lowery on the Self

    ‘For anything to be meaningful, the world must make sense. The world must be orderly, and we must be able to locate ourselves in it.’ Brian Lowery, 2023 Selfless: The Social Creation of ‘You’, p. 193 ‘Selves tell a story… more ›

  • Still standing

    My good friend Hugo Seabra sent me this photo of the Portuguese edition of A Restless Art at the Lisbon Book Fair. It is he, with Isabel Lucena, his erstwhile colleague at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, that I have to thank for the… more ›

  • Maya Angelou on courage

    Anderson Cooper: You don’t believe that there was true equality yet. Maya Angelou: Oh, I know there isn’t, and you know there isn’t, and everybody who hears you knows there isn’t. And yet this is what we have to have.… more ›

  • The danger of certainty

    Certainty is at the dark heart of today’s divisions. The danger is not only that some people take a Manichean view of life—the absolute expression of us and them—but that they are certain, absolutely, resolutely certain, that they are right in… more ›

  • Taking stock

    Earlier this week, I spent several hours going through a jumble of old drafts and notebooks, combining them into a single document. It was instructive. First, I realised that I have written a lot: almost 80,000 words, substantially more than… more ›

  • Kieran Setiya on making a difference

    ‘We shouldn’t feel too bad that we feel bad: our guilt is not a mistake. More important, we shouldn’t let it put us off, condemning our own efforts as too small. They may be small – but it’s perverse to… more ›

  • A strategy for uncertainty

    Improvising means coming prepared, but not being attached to the preparation. Everything flows into the creative act in progress. Come prepared, but be willing to accept interruptions and invitations. Trust that the product of your preparation is not your papers… more ›