MIAAW.net Sophie Hope & Owen Kelly

In this episode Sophie talks to Ben Jones, founder of Dingy Butterflies, a community arts organisation based in Gateshead, in the North East of England.



Ben gives us some background to the organisation and an insight into a recent citizen science and arts project called Bees of Bensham.



We learn something about the myths of bees, and that while their behaviours are perhaps the antithesis of cultural democracy, humans learning to keep habitats scruffy and drawing attention to existing biodiversity perhaps is.

Natalia “Nati” Linares is a cultural organizer and communications strategist who works to expand the horizons for economic fairness and stability to the creative community. Through her work as artist and communications organizer and cofounder of Art.coop, an organization that addresses inequality among artists and culture workers, she helps creatives and culture workers change conversations about the role that art plays in changing our social and economic systems.

Natalia spent more than a decade working in the music industry before joining the New Economy Coalition, a network of over 150 groups focused on building the solidarity economy movement in the U.S. and internationally. In 2021, she co-authored the report Solidarity Not Charity: Arts & Culture Grantmaking in the Solidarity Economy, which traced the long history of artists organizing for economic justice and pushed funders to invest in solutions to the root causes of systemic failures that leave artists vulnerable. Art.coop supports artistic communities to provide for themselves and increase collective ownership of housing and creative businesses, as well as build solidarity in the field by speaking more openly about the harsh realities of making a living in their industries while tapping into legacies of artist resistance.

In Culture of Possibility #41, Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso interview Nati Linares, whose focus is the solidarity economy for artists, with its resist/fight and build model: calling attention to what’s wrong, experimenting with alternatives. We talk about Nati’s grounding in the music business, leading to an understanding of capitalism and how it works or doesn’t for artists, and the research she and her colleagues have done on alternative models for financing artists’ work.

Sound artist and composer Simon James reflects on his recent project with young people in Whitehawk, initiated as part of the Class Divide campaign - fighting against the educational attainment gap in East Brighton.

Sounds recorded during workshops, both on the Whitehawk housing estate and on an adjacent archaeological site, formed part of the exhibition Neolithic Cannibals: Deep Listening to the Unheard. Neolithic Cannibals recreated the Neolithic Camp - a place of communion, celebration, and ritual - as a compassionate listening space inviting audiences to discover Whitehawk's richness, joy, playfulness, and hope, empowering local voices through rarely explored sonic expressions.

Simon discusses the process of the project, and how listening played a central part throughout it.

Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope discuss Solidarity Not Charity, written by Nati Linares and Caroline Woolard. This “rapid report” analyses “arts and culture grantmaking in the solidarity economy”, a term that it borrows from a long standing radical, feminist economic movement.

As often, discussing parts of the report leads to a wider discussion about the issues that the report addresses. Can we assume that grantmakers have our interests at heart? Can we assume that we have a working relationship with funders, or should we see ourselves in a struggle against what they stand for?



Whatever happened to the strategies of self-funding that people at many different times and in many parts of the world used to build autonomous oppositional structures? Has this possibility disappeared in the rush to consumption?

The book provides a valuable resource in at least three ways. It presents a coherent argument. It presents a lot of interesting case studies and examples. It serves to trigger wider discussions.

Every year some months have five Fridays, and every time this happens we find something to do there: something out of our normal schedule. We try to adopt an annual theme. In 2021 we played music licensed under creative commons licences; in 2022 we found four old radio shows; and in 2023 we looked back to four early episodes of Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse.

This year whenever we stumble into the fifth Friday of a month we will look around us and find a podcast that interests us: one published under a Creative Commons licence that relates in one way or another to our areas of interest.

This show brings you Episode 69 of a podcast called Free as in Freedom, and was released on Tuesday 12 November 2019. It was produced by The Software Freedom Conservancy.

Karen M. Sandler and Bradley M Kuhn discuss the end to Microsoft's e-book platform and move on to talk more generally about the dangers and disasters that Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) causes for software users and developers

This episode is a live recording of an event in which Sophie Hope talks with artists Amy Feneck and Ruth Beale. Together they reflect on 12 years of collaborative practice, spanning art, politics and the ongoing need to talk about economics.

The conversation that forms the heart of this episode was recorded at an event organised by the Alternative School of Economics on 9 March 2023 at Gasworks,in London, England.