curious patterns #11
Insights into informal cultural economies, readings about environmental sustainability in the arts, and thoughts on personal shortcomings in virtual collaboration.
This month was wild with incredible things happening left and right. I was actually struggling to make this email not burst out of its seams (or Gmail’s automatic clipping feature) and decided to move some really awesome research, reports and toolkits to next month’s issue. On that note, big thanks to those of you, who regularly send me great content recommendations - you rock! If you, too, have come across some fascinating writing / video / podcast / event / artwork / etc, please do share!
Now, enjoy issue 11 of curious patterns.
Lovely people at LASALLE College of the Arts 🇸🇬, The Sound Initiative 🇰🇭, UNDP 🇫🇯, GIZ 🇩🇪, CASIK 🇰🇪, KOOMPI 🇰🇭, and Heilbronn UAS 🇩🇪 - thank you for subscribing!
🇦🇷 Give kids a laptop and watch your cultural industry grow. Now that’s what I call programme impact, Argentina. From education initiative to national hip hop contests.
🤝 At EUNIC, they are plotting a toolkit on fair cooperation in cultural relations. Here is the provocation paper by the toolkit developers. Ready to question what fair culture is?
🇱🇦 Two cautionary tales from Laos on why culture needs to be considered in development as well as post-disaster recovery. Culture is the grammar of behaviour.
🌍 Here is a good summary of a wonderfully sharp conference across Nairobi & Berlin, incl. calling bullshit on restitution of cultural heritage in the name of decolonisation.
🏦 The World Bank and UNESCO are now buddies, and on the menu is investment to prop up creative cities. Pretty heavy on the spillovers, but also thoughtful approaches.
🦠 I love that the internet is keeping zine culture alive. This new issue of Jahazi centres artist voices in East Africa reflecting on the pandemic.
🇳🇱 Vlisco is a massive producer of African wax print from the Netherlands. An African conglomerate wanted to invest in the company. Cue fear of losing colonial privileges.
🇪🇨🇲🇽 UNHCR discovers the power of music for social change, or rather awareness raising. In any case, I’m glad big institutions are starting to look a little beyond.
🇩🇪 Quick, tell everyone - the humanities aren’t dead yet. Why you ask? Well, the military is now using novels for armed conflict prediction.
🇻🇳 Promoting diversity of cultural expressions whilst restricting freedom of speech on social media? Vietnam is doing the two steps forward, one step backwards dance.
🌎🌍🌏 On digital positionality
Last month, I had calls with people in Malawi, Cambodia, Germany, and Singapore. I participated at webinars with presenters in the UK, Australia, Thailand, and South Africa. I wrote email and chat messages to people in Tonga, Fiji, India, Qatar, and the US. And I couldn’t help but to think of a chair. 🪑!
During the admission interview for my undergraduate studies many years ago, the man with the 9 fingers, who used to be a pianist but also a tad bit too much of a critical mind in socialist East Germany, pointed at one corner of his office. There was a plastic chair. The type you’d find at every garden party in Germany, often in a weathered off-white, not even trying to defy the elements. The man, who later turned out to be my professor for philosophy and aesthetics, was making a point that this plain, simple plastic chair probably exists in one version or another in every single country in this world.
I was confused. Not because I didn’t believe him - I mean, sure, everbody’s gotta sit. I was confused because for him this humble plastic chair was the perfect image of globalisation. A symbol of what global capitalism has achieved: designing a mould for cheap and environmentally disastrous material to be cast into a seemingly universal tool for personal indulgence. And yet, it is a common denominator, something familiar to most people. A bloody plastic chair!
In school, globalisation was preached to us as the big equaliser. The world’s your oyster, free trade and all that jazz. It’s true - my privileged ass has benefitted a great deal from globalisation, both on a structural and a personal level. I am incredibly grateful for the friends I have met and the learnings I was allowed to make on the way. Today, I have to keep reconsidering my positionality. Who am I, and where?
I would argue that being aware of yourself and your positionality is significantly easier when you’re physically somewhere - every action and reaction is felt immediately by all senses. But in a world that largely shifted to virtual communication, I am not so sure anymore. By trying to create frictionless virtual experiences, I am afraid we might lose our edge to see ourselves in context and account for it. We take that black window with a bunch of faces staring back at us for granted. Yet, while we all might sit on that damn plastic chair while having our Zoom meetings, our internet connections, data bundle prices, electricity networks, cameras and microphones, as well as our work from home environments are not necessarily the same.
The question is, in fact, how do we negotiate a virtual environment that hopes to equalise but is inherently built on a foundation of global inequities and consumer culture? How do we ensure that we don’t forget our own place, person and privilege in any virtual encounter? How do different communication cultures with codes and hierarchies translate to the virtual? Also, who gets to participate and who doesn’t?
I think this image of the global plastic chair just reminded me that the people on the other end of my email, chat or online conference share common experiences with me, but also that I must not forget the unique circumstances of each and everyone. Don’t lose sight of who you are and whom you are talking to, just because it’s through a screen.
IMPACT
🎨 We need more art in evaluation. The folks over at ANDimplementation think so, too, and just put out a call for likeminded souls to which you can RSVP here. The organisers’ plan for this community of practice is simple and adorable: We can nerd out over techniques, share silly stories about using or failing at using arts in evaluation, and swap advice and strategies. I for sure do not want to miss out on that geek club. And they try to accommodate all our wildly different timezones. Who else am I going to see there?
📊 A data visualisation is worth a thousand words. Even more, if you ask me. And it’s important what these words would say, from whose perspective and to what end. The Alternative narratives visualization archive is an open and living collection of dataviz projects that look at the other side of the coin, the marginalised experiences, the silenced realities. From eviction mapping and protest art documentation to playable theories of radical transparency as strategy for social change, you will find a rich archive of fascinating projects to learn from, which is also open for submissions.
🌻 Did I mention that we all need to do something about climate change? Well, here are some hands-on tools for y’all. The EU-funded SHIFT programme has been churning out a bunch of really useful resources recently. I particularly like this annotated bibliography of environmental sustainability readings relevant for the culture sector and this comparison of mobility carbon calculators. Get to work!
🔀 Informality x Cultural economy
The Relationship between the Informal Economy and the Cultural Economy in the Global South: Research and creative content from 10 countries
(2021)
First off, big kudos for publishing this series of research essays on the intersection of the informal economy and the cultural economy in a self-contained free online publication via Medium. Easy navigation, clean design, and it allows for multimedia content to augment the writing - I like this approach.
Aesthetics aside, this research project by the International Council of Nesta’s Creative Industries Policy & Evidence Centre is bang on. The 9 case studies from 10 countries in the Global South examine the manifold ways in which formal and informal economies intersect with, govern and inform each place’s cultural economy. While this is a notoriously hard thing to research, the sheer prevalence of informal economies in the Global South means that we must start to better understand it. The authors of the Nairobi case study make sense of it in a way that has us apply a new lens altogether:
[…] the question of informality would not be viewed as a fringe market condition but as the dominant economic epistemology.
Interviewees in the Peru and Chile case study made another important remark that touches on the complexity cultural actors face when it comes to monetisation:
[Some] women did not view their work in the informal tourism economy as informal work. They considered the word ‘informal’ to have negative connotations and, instead, framed their work as contributing to the dissemination of Indigenous knowledge.
Each text either identifies unique ways to support informal cultural actors in their respective local contexts or develops a deeper understanding of the ways these formal and informal economies are intertwined in the wider cultural sector. And intertwined they are. The Cairo study illustrates how formal-informal is not a binary state. They intersect and exist within each other. The breadth of the research essays illustrate just in how in many layers and various forms informality really comes.
Here are some super brief shortcut insights - make sure to read the whole thing along additional case studies from 🇿🇦 South Africa, 🇧🇷 Brazil, 🇨🇴 Colombia, and 🇪🇨 Ecuador:
🇰🇪 Kenya: A major obstacle to going formal for informal textile entrepreneurs are massive up-front and recurring expenses. Capital is difficult to access, especially for women without collateral, so many resort to informal debt, which can be predatory. Growth is inhibited because informal businesses cannot request formal loans during peak business times when growth would technically be possible if for available capital.
→ Vendors half-formalise in a savings and credit cooperative to create access to capital and other innovative products.
🇵🇪🇨🇱 Peru & Chile: For many women - often artisans - the informal tourism sector is a side-hustle with enough flexibility to also manage domestic work. They are not going formal because of prohibitively high costs and complex bureaucratic processes. These include altering certain ICH practices to fit the 'quality standards' - ugh! At the same time, there are police shake-downs and street harassment. Covid made things even worse since artisan trade fairs - a major sales channel - were cancelled. Relief could not be accessed due to informality. But some women used the skills gained in the informal economy to build new side-hustles during the pandemic.
→ More targeted data needs to be collected to inform the creation of gender-sensitive policy instruments.
🇮🇩 Indonesia: Bandung is a domestic tourism destination, UNESCO Creative City, and also has a large population of young people. In addition to textiles, the city is famous for a strong culinary culture. Many food vendors and F&B outlets are informal with no access to capital or government services. A local organisation invented a gamified culinary city walk that takes visitors to various informal guardians of Bandung's culinary heritage, thus achieving multiple SDG-relevant outcomes.
→ Get creative city ecosystem actors (incl. government) to connect, celebrate, and collaborate with informal actors.
🇪🇬 Egypt: Cairo is a patchwork of formal and informal urban areas. The project was trying to bridge the more and the less formal through a distinctly cultural approach. First, they brought craftspeople and young artists and designers together for skills exchange bridging formal and informal knowledge production. Then, in a branding exercise for facades of culturally relevant places, craftspeople and designers collaborated on shutter design and signage. It was noted that service procurement becomes more flexible and discursive while formal and informal processes of production start to intertwine. Experience in informality became a strong asset when it enabled actors to find creative solutions to problems in the formal sphere.
→ Adopt small-scale, incremental changes whilst facilitating exchange between the more informal and the more formal.
As the authors of the Cairo case put it so neatly: informality is creativity. I think that’s a brilliant note to leave you to explore these rich texts yourself and perhaps also have a wee look around your own neighbourhood.
LIMINAL SPACE
🥑 I love beautifully crafted sustainability messaging. Join me in exploring the Museum of Endangered Foods, and come say goodbye. Honey, avocados, coffee - all gone in 30 years (or significantly endangered). I know, some people just lost the will to survive until 2050 with the prospect of no coffee, but hear me out: you could bring this design experiment as a physical exhibition to a museum or gallery near you and perhaps change the course of human ecocide. And if you’ve already given up, at least it seems like you will be able to get a wine buzz going until the end of the century.
🎁 Toolkits are the opposite of localised interventions. In fact, they are an attempt to bring a seemingly universal short-term solution to an imminent crisis. They are rarely designed to be adaptable, flexible or localised. Unboxing the Toolkit is a brilliant analytical essay on the fascinating history of the toolkit approach that takes you on a wild journey from rape kits via bento boxes and prepper vans to participatory development card decks, all while throwing some shade at design thinking and technofetishism. The essay also reminded me of this paper on how the toolkit approach to arts impact assessment is flawed. Enjoy diving in and out of these boxes!
🎻 Meet the new UN Climate Change Goodwill Ambassador! The Beethoven Orchestra Bonn is UNFCCC’s first appointment for goodwill ambassador. Interesting and rather elitist, if I may say so, is the Executive Secretary’s rationale for the appointment: “engaging artists and musicians around the world, who will inspire and empower political leaders to be as ambitious as possible in driving forward the implementation of the Paris Agreement.” Whatever. Here’s a pretty nice pandemic rendition of Beethoven’s 6th. (h/t to the latest EMC newsletter which has gotten a lot more interesting recently - big focus on sustainability)
OPPORTUNITIES
22 August: 9th World Summit on Arts and Culture 2022 (call for programme proposals)
🌐 You know that IFACCA conference that takes place every three years? That event where you have all sorts of arts council execs and culture ministry delegates from around the world take extensive coffee breaks? Kidding - I love these coffee breaks! Aside from the often self-congratulatory vibe, I really do like the World Summit on Arts and Culture for the people it attracts and the conversations that happen around it. The next one is coming up in June 2022 and will be hosted in Stockholm. If you think you’ve got a great idea to ruffle some feathers (especially if it’s around the theme safeguarding artistic freedom), you may apply now to put together a session.
31 August: Online Training on Impact Assessments for World Heritage (call for applications)
🏛️ ICCROM and UNESCO’s World Heritage Institute of Training and Research for the Asia and the Pacific Region (or WHITRAP in short, duh) have put together an online training course for heritage managers and state parties to learn about impact assessments. Apparently, they are increasingly needed to make sure your site gets on the list or doesn’t get crossed off (👋 hello Liverpool). It’s 500 bucks but you might be eligible for a fee waiver if you’re from a state party in the Asia-Pacific region.
1 September: Arts Practices and Cultural Policies in Conditions of Disaster (call for papers)
💣 Zee Germans are at it again and they want your research on the perpetual status quo - or at least that’s what it feels like most of the time. If you’ve got something on arts and cultural policy affecting or being affected by current climate, health, and economic crises, then this CfP is for you. The call description says that they also want authors to look at cases of disaster mismanagement. I reckon that sounds really quite exciting. Would have loved to see crisis of democracy in the mix, too.
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