curious patterns #10
On degrowth for creative industries, structural racism in evaluation and development finance, and how vaccine injustice hurts the arts.
I want to start this issue by acknowledging all you readers out there. It’s both comforting and electrifying to know that there’s a quite a bunch of us who care about arts, impact, global justice and social change. And curious patterns is here to provide you with the latest culture and development news, cheeky comments, random thoughts (and anxieties) as well as the odd analysis of new work out there.
A big welcome to new subscribers from Sorella Produções, AEA Consulting and the Asia-Europe Foundation. You are 🔥!
You want to be 🔥, too? Easy - sign up here, and forward this email to your mates:
✊ Want to take a deep dive into issues of artistic freedom in Asia? Learn something about culture of conformity and trojan horse strategies? This is your publication!
🇨🇴 Interesting: The International Organization for Migration, IOM is now dabbling in culture and development funding in Colombia. Welcome to the party, I guess.
🌏 arts x social change in Southeast Asia. Mekong Cultural Hub’s Meeting Point facilitated much needed, intimate conversation. Read the brilliant case studies!
🇻🇪 Let’s not forget that great concepts and models cannot make up for human failure. There are some pretty harrowing sexual abuse stories coming out of El Sistema.
🎧 As streaming services in Africa need to localise, local spending patterns suggest daily or weekly subscriptions. Think of the urgency for audiences, but also the churn.
🇰🇭 Arts organisations of Cambodia, unite! Truth is, forming an association will provide a solid edge to advocate for fair pay, social protection and actually useful policy.
🌎 Heaps of important points in this impressive Ibero-American Strategy for Culture and Sustainable Development. Also, a neat review of global culture and dev policy.
🇨🇳🇦🇫🇵🇰 Get ready for the Asian Cultural Heritage Protection Action. China has understood that culture is key for any development, and they’re likely going big.
🔎 Zooming in on African narratives 🌍
We are often eligible for grants because of our status as a non-profit organisation in a developing country and yet none of these grants engage critically with the very notion of what development even means.
YES! Teesa Bahana of 🇺🇬 Uganda’s 32° East absolutely nails it in her Guardian op-ed that reads like the cry for action that is so very much needed. There is a major disconnect between national governments’ notion of development, the international development industry’s unspoken mechanisms and what artists really can contribute to development. Teesa criticises restrictive funding moulds and diametrically opposed development logics. Artists are the ones that connect the dots and collectively engage with what utopia even means. But they often remain unheard in the race for higher, faster, further.
There is a strong need to develop new narratives that are African specific, which includes language, heritage, tradition, ceremony, indigenous knowledge, artistic disciplines, cultural and creative industries and sees them holistically. This terminology is not purely semantic: it seeks to re-establish the culture's organic meaning in the everyday lives of African people, its social significance in community cohesion, and indeed its moral weight.
What Avril Joffe from 🇿🇦 South Africa’s Wits School of Arts suggests is the importance of striving to break out of these development paradigms and contradictions. Yes, cultural and creative industries have massive development potential in Africa, but only you yourself can create the narratives away from colonial legacies and simplistic entertainment industry logic. It’s a perpetual push and pull. Is the pandemic the opportune push moment, though?
All of our museums can be made more dynamic and engaging if we can move away from calcifying hierarchies, and instead acknowledge that we need to constantly learn alongside people, who are just as important as objects.
Nana Oforiatta Ayim and the 🇬🇭 Ghana Museums and Monuments Board take this conversation to a whole new level of innovation, one of understanding development as developing. Museums should be creative centres, places where the pluralities of heritage and development are explored, narratives and futures are negotiated rather than prescribed. Nana explores what a museum might look like if made of local sustainable materials, inspired by local ontologies, made of interlinked chambers that showcase the pluralities of place and time. Development, then, becomes a conversation that ventures far beyond the prevalent growth rationale.
📉 Degrowth or else
I am writing this newsletter from the most liveable city in the world. Or so they say. What does that even mean, though? Never mind the insane housing crisis and child poverty rates, the structural racism, and sewage seeping into the sea. I guess we are COVID-free and there are some nice beaches - but for how long? All is not well.
Tāmaki Makaurau is home to large populations of people from Moana Oceania (= the Pacific and its islands). There are more nationals and descendants of certain countries in this city than in their home islands. Tāmaki Makaurau is also and will continue to be a refuge of sorts for the many climate migrants from the region whilst being acutely endangered by rising sea-levels itself. Heck! 🇰🇮 Kiribati has already purchased land in 🇫🇯 Fiji to prepare for the impending climate catastrophe. Relocation is not just about survival, it is fundamentally about culture. Can you transplant culture, though? On top of that, is it even possible to move an arts ecosystem, a cultural industry? For Tāmaki Makaurau-based youth activist group 4 Tha Kulture it’s all in a name: climate change is Pacific genocide. They’re not wrong.
Governments in domestic but also in cooperation settings still mostly see arts, culture and the creative industries solely as a growth vector. Of course, this is problematic because of the simplistic value attached to it, but there is no denying the importance of the economic dimension when it comes to livelihoods. For those of us in culture, we might also feel a certain entitlement and righteousness about not needing to react to the climate emergency because we might feel that we’re not the bad ones. I find myself constantly oscillating between:
We are the visionaries, the researchers, the custodians of culture and the futurists. We can’t be compromised, we need to lead this transformation.
and
We are part of the problem. Art for art’s sake is not enough anymore. Change needs to take place everywhere, and we need to realise our responsibility.
I have a slight hinge that I am not the only one with this inner conflict on how to view arts, culture and even the creative industries in the context of this global climate crisis that requires us to act NOW (yesterday really, but who’s counting, right?). I just want to channel my cynical idealism in the right direction and not be overwhelmed by this very special flavour of crippling climate anxiety. But what is that right direction?
Degrowth is what ultimately comes to mind when hoping to reverse the seemingly inevitable. The prospects of a magic techno-cure to climate change are slim, international trade and consumption including that of cultural goods are ever-increasing, and we are realising the volatility and limits of the current economic system. I reckon it’s time to not only review the shitty design that ends up on a landfill and all those paintings that eat up valuable resources in climate-controlled storage, the culture sector needs to be front and centre in ensuring our (and its own) future. At the same time, funders and other stakeholders need to hold the sector accountable whilst creating the right infrastructure and support mechanisms.
Culture should be at the core of rethinking our entire economic system. Any work, any innovation must be made for collaboration and the common good, just like the Abya Yala-originating concept of tequiology. We need to focus on local ecosystems, explore circularity, and, most of all, we need to consume and produce less. Inevitably, when you start to think about who should be allowed to develop and invest in their cultural sector, and who needs to scale down big time, you are also entering the domain of global justice. Hello privileges 👋
In the end it’s a question of responsibility and cooperation — are we prepared?
Here are other thoughts that I couldn’t find a spot for in my incoherent ramblings:
🌳 The Chief Economist of the UN wants us to start measuring the value of nature.
📉 Even the EU Environment Agency thinks that degrowth might be the way to go.
IMPACT
🪞 The practice of evaluation suffers from structural racism. No surprise there. Fontane Lo and Rachele Espiritu from Evaluation Is So White have developed a neat self-assessment tool for funders and evaluation firms to, you guessed it, self-assess where on the road to equitable evaluation practice you are. What do you reckon, does your organisation openly acknowledge the role and challenges of white-dominant notions of leadership and expertise?
🤑 In Africa, development finance institutions are providing capital to funds predominantly investing in white founders. That’s one thing I recently learned from Devex Invested. This relatively new development finance newsletter is all about big numbers (seriously big), development banks, innovative finance and fundraising news. Probably a bit too much for many, but I believe that we need to understand the larger systems to eventually make them more equitable (like this abomination in the first sentence), or at least make them work for the right causes. So, learn something new?
🐈 Curiosity is the new expertise. Or something like that. The Innovation Service of UNHCR, the refugee agency, is trying something new: curiosity-led and exploratory research. This is right down my alley and I applaud them for embracing the intentional search for what we don’t yet know. Here you can read how UNHCR is using this method in their research, but, more interestingly, here is a staffer’s ode to curiosity.
💉 The vaccine dimension in fair cultural cooperation
✒️ Guest article by Pedro Affonso Ivo Franco, a Brazilian, Berlin-based percussionist, consultant and researcher working across the cultural, creativity and development sectors. He is UNCTAD consultant for the “Train for Trade II” project in Angola, and is co-coordinating the research project "Impacts of COVID-19 in the Brazilian cultural and creative sectors".
Should the arts, cultural and entertainment sectors advocate for more vaccine distribution?
Arts, culture, and entertainment are probably the most affected sectors by the pandemic, they were the first to stop and will be the last to fully restart.
This commonly heard phrase is certainly applicable to different countries and realities around the world since the beginning of the pandemic. If we are facing the same problem, why not employ our sensitivity and solidarity to support those with scarcer means to mitigate and resolve the problem?
Based in Berlin and currently collaborating with colleagues on projects in East Africa, Angola, and Brazil, I felt provoked to write, exchange, and mature my thoughts on which role(s) the arts, culture and entertainment sectors can play during the pandemic.
With the vaccination rate increasing, infection rate decreasing, different kinds of tests made available, and a big stock of vaccines, some countries within the EU, the US, Israel and New Zealand have been flirting with back-to-normal life. For countries with 60%, or even fewer of the population fully vaccinated, this back-to-normal life includes the return of live shows on Broadway, open-air and cinema festivals, a concert in Barcelona for 5,000 people, fête de la music in Paris and other events.
I am sure that such events - either in smaller or bigger proportions - are taking place around Latin America and the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and Africa either without any or with some flexible sanitary security measures and protocols (which are not always respected in European cities like Berlin anyway). In my country, Brazil, the reasons why these events take place vary, from economic needs to lack of governmental planning and control (reasons which I suspect may also resonate in other countries).
Above and below the equator, in the midst of these precipitated attempts to be back to normal, the only light at the end of the tunnel, so far, is the vaccine. In high-income countries, on average, one in four people has already been vaccinated, while in poor nations only one in 500 has been immunized. We are way off the 11 billion doses the WHO estimates are needed to vaccinate the whole world to a level of 70%, the point at which transmission of the virus could be significantly reduced.
Then comes the question: are the arts, cultural and entertainment sectors talking enough about fair vaccine distribution? How can we talk about going back to normal? How can we talk about resilience, strategies to recover and restarting activities when most countries do not even have access to vaccines? Are we only talking about the Global North reality, disconnecting ourselves from the reality of the majority? Is this the way to make the world a better place after the pandemic?
In a brief period of time, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted efforts to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In the meantime, the UN is promoting the International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development which could give us an interesting stage to lobby about fair vaccine distribution. Are we taking the initiative? Should we actually play this role? Why not...?
In June, during the EUNIC European Spaces of Culture online conference, Professor Kimani Njogu, a partner from Kenya, has advocated for fair vaccine distribution. During the Culture at Work Africa event, I reinforced Professor Kimani’s message and raised the point about physical mobility issues. If the EU does not accept or continues its efforts to reject people who have received certain jabs widely used in developing countries entering the continent - for example, the Chinese Sinovac, the Russian Sputnik V or the AstraZeneca vaccine produced by the Serum Institute of India - how will physical mobility be back to normal for those without an EU COVID Green Pass? Will artists, creators and professionals in the developing world continue to rely on and be trapped by a weak digital connection for as long as they are considered to be second class COVID travellers?
In my opinion, we definitively need to start addressing the vaccine fair distribution issues directly, at least by making sure these topics are included in events about resilience, sustainable development, and strategies to recover. In my view, more than ever, it is crucial for the arts, cultural and entertainment sectors to break the silos, engage in this conversation and allow this conversation to be injected into ours.
In the meantime, I am still asking myself if a “We Are the World”-type video packed with entertainment celebs could be a good idea. Perhaps a “We Are the World, We Need Vaccines” version with “Global South” artists could be more efficient now.
This is shortened version - read Pedro’s full article here!
LIMINAL SPACE
💬 Welcome to the MDGs: Mzungus in Development and Government. If you haven’t been a stan of Omar already, you’ll be in just a few minutes - right after you have read his hilarious and cynically accurate illustration of the development sector, with himself as the protagonist. As insider-outsider, his ethnography in comic form has brilliant and feisty insights into development workers’ lives, the juicy margins of expat culture and the occasional ridiculousness of KPIs. Chapter 2 is out now - pure gold!
🏛️ Public Service Announcement: Subscribe to this newsletter! No, seriously! Medhavi and Larissa from Dig It! found the sweet spot between geeking out over digital cultural heritage and open GLAM (slightly irrelevant side note: if there ever was a perfect acronym, this might be it), and curating thematic resources around super relevant topics such as climate change, restitution and collaboration tools in that field. I almost feel guilty that it took me so long to stumble across this amazing publication. Get in there, absolutely worth it.
🍕 Dear funders: If you don’t know what’s wrong, watch this video! I hope you cringe hard and look in the mirror. And then, I hope, you will go back into the strategy room and centre equitable practices in your next funding round. Six and a half minutes you won’t regret watching, even if you’re not in the pizza business. You got this!
MEANWHILE ON TWITTER
OPPORTUNITIES
8 June - 8 October: Culture Over Coffee (grants for small gatherings)
☕ In my previous job, when people asked me what I do, I sometimes half-jokingly responded that I have professional coffee meetings for a living. That very former employer now offers small grants for coffee meetings (virtual or otherwise) to talk about arts and culture. I feel very much validated. Go check out this awesome initiative! Only caveat, y’all must be from ASEM countries as it’s a joint initiative with the Asia-Europe Foundation.
Ongoing: Protection of Cultural Property (online course for military, police, and law enforcement)
🪖 This is probably quite niche. But then again, most of the stuff I write about is. UNESCO and the Peace Operations Training Institute put together this self-paced online course for military and police on how to protect cultural property during armed conflict, especially from a legal perspective. Full disclosure, I haven’t taken the course and can’t speak to its merit, but I found the angle intriguing.
Ongoing: Peace Education in Practice (online course for everyone)
🕊️ And to balance things out, here’s a self-guided online course on peace education by an organisation that I have been a member of for about 12 years now, Service Civil International. It’s a brilliant course with more than 50 short lessons on a wide variety of perspectives on peace. It’s not heavy and great for a little learning and reflection for these odd 20-minute breaks between meetings. Also, how cute are these illustrations?
curious patterns is a monthly email newsletter on all things culture, impact and development, written by Kai T. Brennert (Twitter | edge & story).
Please forward this newsletter to a friend, and do reach out: kai@edgeandstory.com
This just keeps getting better and better!