curious patterns #12
Non-linear arts management, measuring assimilation, and celebrating the small wins of participatory cultural governance
curious patterns is a monthly email newsletter on all things culture, impact and development, written by Kai Brennert (Twitter | edge & story).
The warmest of welcomes to new subscribers from the University of Toronto 🇨🇦, Mekong Cultural Hub 🇹🇼, The Festival Institute 🇲🇼, Nicolas Bertrand Consulting 🇫🇷, and Glean 🇰🇭
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🤝 EUNIC is going all collab! First with the EU’s External Action Service, and then with RIDCULT on EU-Ibero American cooperation in culture and sustainable development.
🪘 “Why should you deny an object its function?” This, an exhibition of missing objects, and other noble causes at the Open Restitution Africa Project.
🇦🇴 Big names, big plans, big ambitions - the Biennale of Luanda wants to be the Pan-African Forum for the Culture of Peace. UNESCO and the African Union are in on it.
🇬🇪 Touring support for theatres isn’t new, but touring support for Georgian theatres to go perform near Russian-occupied Abkhazia and South Ossetia is quite something.
🇯🇲 A critical gap in all economic policy programmes has been the sidelining of culture in the development matrix. Hallelujah! Plus: hot take on consultants from the North.
🇲🇾 Artists who work in and with communities do a lot of emotional and social labour. Thoughtful reflection on why you need someone to hold space for you once in a while.
🏭 The 20 largest economies acknowledge the role of culture - finally. Just got to figure out what “inclusive and balanced growth patterns” are supposed to be now.
🇹🇳 Didn’t know there was an official UN SDG Good Practice database, but here we are. Tfanen-Tunisie Créative cuts across education, gender, fair work and peace.
🌏 And if you want to hear me babble about the small wins of participatory cultural governance, you can now tune into a recording of our Backstage: Managing creativity and the arts in South-East Asia book launch. The publication is now also available in Thai, Lao, Khmer, Vietnamese and Indonesian.
🧶 What if?
We were simultaneous, cyclical, parallel, non-linear.
The arts were only for a point in time and place, not meant to be preserved.
Everything was interconnected and interdependent, alive in systems and in patterns.
There was no point in artificially keeping things alive that do not work, do not live.
We had to discover how be part of a functioning ecosystem, not act against it.
Arts management really meant building to not last.
The arts served a hyperlocal and specific mission, each in their own unique way.
There was no need and no pressure to build resilience for the future.
There were no massive institutions or big buildings.
Foundations were spent down and arts organisations set up around a single goal, not an eternal mission.
They were to come and go, evolve and adapt, sow seeds and start anew.
Sustainable development was not intrinsically linear, hell-bent on growth, an oxymoron.
Development actually meant exploration, discovery, learning.
Everything was a pattern, a curious one.
It fell to us to discern these patterns, and protect them.
And since these incoherent ramblings of mine were inspired by something, I’ll straight up recommend the book that has my synapses in a major twist: Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta is an incredible introduction into seeing and understanding patterns.
If you’re not convinced yet, somebody on Goodreads found some words for it:
Reading Tyson's book is like dropping a mentos into a bottle of coke. That coke is never going to be the same again.
IMPACT
🏢 Where do we get our data from, and how independent is it? As we use openly available country data and feed them into our data frameworks and analyses, this very good point was made by a handful of World Bankers in relation to the independence of National Statistic Offices. It appears, there is way too much political meddling in creating and reporting national statistics. National Statistics Offices have to master the balancing act between relevance and independence. As data consumers, we need to question both the data itself and what governance structure made it possible.
☁️ That leads us to the next question: what are we measuring in the first place? If the indicators you use are mainly informed by what you perceive as the norm, then we’ve got an issue. When we think of cultural diversity, the value sets and different ways of knowing, our data collection might easily end up measuring assimilation. In this Data Values Digest newsletter post, you can find some thoughts on indigenous data sovereignty and how that relates to the very foundational act of indicator development, alongside a rich reading list with resources from around the world.
📈 Also, oligopsony is a real thing apparently. Anisa Khadem Nwachuku takes us on a road trip through the land of economic theory and development policy. We pass big lakes of development issues with lush singular donor islands and vast empty plains of abandoned issues areas. In short, Anisa describes how few donors in a certain field and geography paired with a flavour-of-the-day funding mentality can be the source of massive, possibly self-serving power imbalances. Recipe for disaster(s)?
RESEARCH | REPORTS | TOOLKITS
🇯🇲 We all know that governments only really listen when you talk Benjamins. Or Donalds in the case of this Caribbean country. Either way, the folks at Nordicity put together a fat report on the state of the creative industries in Jamaica and appeal exactly to that notion of how much national bang you get for your creative buck. Main immediate recommendation: get organised and start to systematically collect data. Looks like a pretty solid mapping to me if the economic angle is what you’re after.
📢 All we need is space, community, training, and funding! Consultancy VibeLab is normally doing all kinds of work related to the night-time economy. So this assignment by GIZ to look at pandemic impacts on CCIs in Africa and the Middle East, and the implications for development cooperation seemed a bit off-brand initially. Even though Voices of Creatives is mostly concerned with the cash cows in the sector (music, fashion and design), this report actually turned out rather nice and adds a few perspectives we probably wouldn’t get from the usual suspects. Yes, there is the occasional do-it-like-we-do-it-in-Germany undertone to some recommendations, but perhaps the raw data is of more interest to you anyway?! If you don’t mind the strong creative industries-tinted lens, this is definitely worth a read.
🌻 Fewer but longer exhibitions - is that degrowth yet? It certainly is a step in the right direction. This toolkit by CIMAM for art museums to take on environmental sustainability is brief but very hands-on. For the overworked curator and museum pro, that’s probably a good thing. It also has links from where to buy in expertise, spotlights of what others are doing (remote installation anyone?), and a reading list. Nothing groundbreaking, but incredibly important as we need to move in breadth and in depth.
🇮🇩 What is an emerging creative city?, asks Christiaan De Beukelaer in his Friction in the Creative City. In the last issue of curious patterns we looked at research into the informal culinary heritage economy of Bandung. This month, you might want to check out Christiaan’s exploration of how different visions of creatives and bureaucrats began to flow into their very own version of the global creative city cookie cutter concept in that same Indonesian city. I was struck by the way activists initially articulated their creative city within a holistic sustainability and liveability vision. Great deep dive into what creative cities can be (or not), what different actors want them to be, and how a depoliticised concept might not be entirely bad after all.
🇺🇦 Everything is digital - even relations. This long report with painful readability (seriously, why?) has us reflect on digital formats in cultural relations. My innovation highlights include transparent audience communication when things get ugly, supplying participants with grants for high-quality video equipment, digital trade fairs, and platform agnosticism - performances on Mozilla Hubs, Discord and in Fortnite, yes please! There’s also a great deal of formats that don’t exactly fall into the digital innovation category, but oh well.
A question that keeps popping up is that of metrics to assess impact of digital cultural relations programming - drop me an email if you’re keen on co-learning!
🙄 Bonus round: How to botch an interesting research project. This IFCCD Report on the contribution of civil society to the promotion and protection of the diversity of cultural expressions in Asia-Pacific reads like the equivalent of a parachute news assignment, except they didn’t really talk to that many people. What you end up with is not all bad, it’s just … nothing much, no substance, a missed opportunity to produce meaningful data. My favourite quote is in the conclusion proclaiming there is a certain level of distrust towards Western organisations - I wonder why…
MEANWHILE ON TWITTER
→ Donations this way if you’re keen to support resettlement efforts for Afghan artists.
LIMINAL SPACE
📚 Is Minecraft redeeming the promise of the internet? Think about it: free and open access to information that is not restricted by governments or other powerful figures, critical debate and collaboration among strangers, an environment only bound by your own imagination. Even though this project might still be far from realising this vision of the free internet (Minecraft was bought by Microsoft after all), it is a brilliantly creative initiative to work on the distribution challenge and celebrate freedom of speech: The Uncensored Library proclaims to be the digital home of press freedom.
🔥 As my time in Aotearoa comes to a close, here’s a taonga I wanted to share. Te Ahi Kai Pō is a song by Ria Hall, and this exceptional version below is performed by the incredibly soulful TEEKS, Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, and kapa haka group Ngā Tūmanako. It translates to the fire burning away the darkness, and references a battle in which many Māori were slaughtered by British colonisers. For Ria, the song is on how to find solace and peace after the onslaught and dispossession. It is a treasure, a powerful piece of art, and an even stronger message. Just wow!
OPPORTUNITIES
15 September: Equity & Evaluation Practice in Cultural Organizations (webinar)
⚖️ First dissect what’s happening, then analyse the heck out of it, and finally discuss problems with culture funders. Yay! The Cultural Research Network invites us to a three-part webinar series on evaluation in cultural organisations, with a distinct focus on equity. They wanna talk power relations, feasibility, participation and funding. Not gonna lie, I’m super excited … but I got unlucky again in the timezone lottery.
20-24 September: Creative Commons Global Summit (virtual conference)
©️ Get out the champagne flutes - the Creative Commons turn 20! The global online conference to celebrate this occasion comes complete with pay-what-you-can registration, a hackathon on open cultural heritage, promising keynotes (if you haven’t heard of Taiwan’s Digital Minister Audrey Tang yet, go use your favourite privacy-first search engine now!), and a bunch of fascinating sessions. No-brainer really.
22 September: New Voices on International Cultural Relations - Culture and Climate Action (online roundtable)
🌊 The British Council is hosting a roundtable on climate action in cultural relations to introduce their new essay series. Looking forward to this event as there are some brilliant minds on the panel, even though I am not fully on board with describing them as necessarily new voices. No shade, just love, Carla and Aimee 😉
4 October: Global Cultural Relations Programme (call for applications)
🌐 Everything’s new: all virtual, all countries eligible, super easy application form. Friends who joined previous editions reported it’s a great programme, so this looks promising. If you’ve got ambitions to improve global cultural relations and are between 25 and 39 years of age, give it a shot, will ya!
Please forward this newsletter to a friend, and do reach out: kai@edgeandstory.com