Gift Culture – MC Matre / Gifted

Today we gave $50US to MC Matre – Matt Sawaya. Matt is a hip hop artist, rapper, poet, mentor, social artist and much more. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

Those who know him know that his live music shows – together with his spoken word – are some of the most energetic and meaningful performances taking place anywhere in the world.

In addition to this, as a social artist, Matt is also working with economics and money in new ways. Matt understands that, as an artist, his cultural contributions to society are not things which can be bought and sold. Rather, by receiving financial gifts, Matt is able to meet his needs into the future so that he is able to create – in absolute freedom – more artworks for society as a whole in times to come. By making gifts to artists in such ways, we are able to become collaborators in the gifts that they are able to freely offer the world.

Matt’s gifting platform is called GIFTED – you can read more about it on his website, where you’ll also find some of his performance work.

This represents a slightly new step because we are not gifting to a project but to a professional cultural creative – and we are gifting him money so that he can meet his needs between now and the next time he is able to freely make a cultural contribution to society as a whole (so the more people give, the more he is able to create). While we have made similar donations already, this is slightly different because the artist we are giving to is striving to receive and work with the money that we have donated in the same spirit in which we have gifted it – that is, both givers and receiver are working with the same picture of money (and economics more broadly) in order that it may be able to support a free cultural life and ultimately work towards healing society as a whole.

This experiment has so far shown that the kind of inner flexibility and strength necessary to work with money in such ways – as giver or receiver – is no easy task. It is a real deed, therefore, that Matt has been able to provide to the rest of the world a shining example – through GIFTED – of new ways of imagining and working with money as a cultural creative. It is an honour to be able to give to him in this way. Thank you Matt!

And thank you for striving with us to find new ways of working with money in order to re-imagine and re-create not just Western Australia, but the world as a whole.

This is art, this is poetry, this is music in our time.

John and Katie