NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 44th episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 20 September 2024. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net‘s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Soundcloud and find links to accompany the podcasts.
William Frodé de la Fôret is Art Director of Cork Community Art Link (CCAL) in the southwest of Ireland. The group’s website describes it this way:
“We encourage meaningful collaborations between artists and people that result in the creation of great art, bringing creativity to places where people live, work and play. We work with people to create a sense of community identity and collective pride enabling people to learn more about themselves and the world around them all the while having fun. Our work engages people both as participants and spectators in public spaces, developing new ways of connecting with the arts and encouraging them to come along, learn new skills and make a creative contribution to the community.”
Cork is the second largest city in Ireland, with a population of about 225,000. William explained that “the city center is very small in comparison with cities on the continent. There’s a lot of different communities living there. There’s been a lot of immigration in the last 30 years. You hear every language in the street. It has gone through profound transformation in the last 30 years. It’s a very vibrant city and quite agreeable to live in.”
William explained that he comes from France and has traveled a great deal, beginning at age 15. In his twenties, he was very interested in music and art, spending three years in art school and moving on from there into street art. He came to Ireland in the early 90s after meeting a woman who lived there, and immediately found work with CCAL as the first person employed when the organization started. “I was absolutely delighted to be able to do art with people. I came out of art school with a very clear understanding that I didn’t want to engage within the art world. To be able to work with people in Ireland was really empowering for me. I found something that was suiting me really well. So that’s how the journey started.”
When William arrived, CCAL’s founder Ron Melling followed his interest in art therapy work in hospitals by setting up a CE Scheme, a community employment program of 20 hours paid work each week for people trying to re-enter the workforce. At that time, an organization could employ up to a dozen people with a supervisor. A key project was a 10-year program at Our Lady’s psychiatric hospital in Cork.
“It was the first long-term program in a psychiatric hospital in Ireland,” William explained. “We worked in a unit with a nurse, a rehabilitation unit meant for men and women. It was the first where women and men would meet. It was for long-term patients, people would have been there for 20, 30, 40 years. For 10 years, we developed a full program encompassing different forms of art: theater, dance, music, but mainly visual art. We set up a workspace, galleries. We reopened plenty of the wards, different dormitories that have been closed, and transformed them with the patients so they were choosing the color on the walls, doing murals, creating a garden, cafe, gallery space, etc. It was the first program of its kind in Ireland. It was really interesting.
“I was very touched by all the people inside that place. They were the most abandoned people in every society. At the time, there was a huge stigma towards people who were affected by strong mental health issues. Plenty of those people would have been put in hospitals because of social poverty at first and then, different kinds of problems, but not always justified. I think some of them were put there because they would have been gay, for example. When you pass lots of time in place like that, you end up being quite hurt. So for 10 years, we developed plenty of programs. We worked with something like 40, 50, people across the years, and some people emerged with very strong bodies of work.”
Because CCAL was staffed by a rotating cast of participants in the CE Scheme, many people moved through the project, taking part in making it possible, in proving and spreading the concept. William explained that “the engagement would go from having a conversation, a cup of tea, music, encouraging people to take part in the different aspects of what we were doing. It was collaborating with the nurse to try to create an environment that was really positive for the people, where they could enjoy creativity. Creativity was a tool that had never been looked at by the people who work in those contexts. But it was obvious that for people who are very regimented, where everybody else has the key of your existence, when you’re confronted with a canvas, or any piece of things, you become the master. You decide what you do. That allows you freedom within incarceration. It also allowed them to be recognized for something else than what they had been until that point.”
William mentioned the example of one resident, called John The Painter, who had major museum and gallery exhibitions including at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in 2003. “It had an impact on the art world, and probably also because it made the news, plenty of people discovered that art was not only what was shown in the museum and assessed by the gatekeeper.”
Much of Cork Community Art Link’s more recent work engages public space and has a major element of spectacle. William explained that as the organization evolved, they were moved by the desire to work with the larger community, doing more events in the street, more street theater and so on. In 2004, CCAL moved to a permanent space in Shandon on the north side of Cork, part of the old city. Funding has always been a challenge, but in 2005 the group began to receive annual funding and Cork was also designated European City of Culture, which brought a lot of attention and gave them the opportunity to work with many community groups, as William describes in the podcast. One outgrowth of that work is the ongoing project called The Dragon of Shandon.
It started in 2006 and has grown from involving a few dozen youth club members to 500 people from different community groups spending months creating a parade led by a 36-foot dragon and incorporating a series of performances, the whole viewed by up to 15,000 people, free and in public space. William described its organic growth as “the people of the north side creating an event that belonged to them. Then the audience grew because the families were coming to see their daughters, their cousins, or whatever. From that there was a great community that was really wanting to get involved, plenty of people who were generous with their time and support, plenty of different artists. Last year we had 30 different community groups taking part, from a choir of Ukrainian people to the youth club of the area, groups of senior citizens, groups of people with disabilities. The idea is that all those people work together and learn about each other. That’s what really interests us, why we use street arts as in a parade. It’s to create that energy, that sense that the street and the city belongs to those people that night. They are the stars, and for a lot of them, it’s highly empowering.”
That is just a taste of our conversation. Tune in and you will learn much more about what Cork Community Art Link does and I think most importantly, why. CCAL is masterful at recycling materials and energy. It’s a model of sustained commitment that I think you will find inspiring.
From the late Sinead O’Connor/Shuhada Sadaqat, “Something Beautiful.”
Order my book: In The Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does It Mean to Be Educated?