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

  • Something and nothing

    Something out of nothing. It begins with silence, a blank page, an empty room. I make a noise, a line; I open a door, walk in. Mostly, it’s the sound, the mark, the gesture that is noticed. When it is… more ›

  • An inquiry

    Loyal readers must, I imagine, be getting impatient with the vague reflections I offer here, and I can understand why. What, after all, have libraries, late style and the self to do with community art and co-creation? Who cares if… more ›

  • What is a library?

    My children don’t read books. I accepted, long ago, that one day they would have to call a bookseller to dispose of my library. When my mother died, I understood why. I had thought I loved her books (she was… more ›

  • How co-creation comes to me

    How Poetry Comes to Me It comes blundering over theBoulders at night, it staysFrightened outside theRange of my campfireI go to meet it at the Edge of the light Gary Snyder, Collected Poems, 2022 That’s how co-creation comes, as we… more ›

  • In the stonemason’s yard

    The posts slowly accumulating here must offer a much less coherent perspective than those at A Restless Art. There, the subject is clearly the history, theory and practice of community art, although that site also took time to find its… more ›

  • Christopher Neve on the humanity of art

    ‘- and you can never be more happy than your least happy child.’ Christopher Neve, Immortal Thoughts, Late Style in a Time of Plague Christopher Neve died in 2024, aged 81. He was a painter and the author of two… more ›

  • Contemporary totalitarianism

    George Orwell died in 1950, and wrote mostly in the context of the struggle of liberal democracy against Nazism and Stalinism. He could hardly have imagined the world in which we live, and yet somehow he did, if not in… more ›

  • Struggling with the Self

    Artistic creativity won’t heal the horrors of the world; it won’t save anyone or anything. But it is practice — and through practice we change the self, and the relationship of the self with all things. Stephen Nachmanovitch As you… more ›

  • The imagination and co-creation

    Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of Ursula K. Le Guin, in awe of her extraordinary gifts as a writer and of her qualities as a human being. I was 60 before I discovered her, first through her essays, then her… more ›

  • Vaclav Havel on Hope

    ‘Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.’ ‘The more unpromising the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It… more ›