curious patterns #14
Cultural relations between the fragile and the fragmented, a tale of cultural custodianship, and the innovation dilemma.
curious patterns is a monthly email newsletter on all things culture, impact and development, written by Kai Brennert (Twitter | edge & story).
The last month has been busy with settling into my new solopreneur life, having loads of calls with friends, clients and potential collaborators. I also gave a little introduction to the role of arts, culture and creative industries in sustainable development to the International Development Young Professionals New Zealand Association, which was pretty fun and really has me thinking whether I should do more of those, perhaps focusing on special issues in particular?
New subscribers at Phare, the Cambodian Circus 🇰🇭, The United Nations Association of New Zealand 🇳🇿, Phum Impact 🇰🇭, KEA European Affairs 🇧🇪, Goethe-Institut 🇩🇪, and ARTCENA 🇫🇷 - thanks for being awesome!
📼 Netflix is giving out free plans in Kenya and started a fund with UNESCO to turn African folk tales into content for the platform. How to capture a market, am I right?
🌊 It’s COP o’clock, and here’s a timely reminder that indigenous knowledge must be front and centre in safeguarding the Pacific Island seas, not limit it to notions of ICH.
🇸🇴 Poetry for peace. That’s UNDP’s rationale for supporting arts in Somalia. I’m all for it, but, boy, do I want to see the theory of change behind that project.
🇪🇹 Here’s a reflection on a cultural heritage protection course for armed forces and police that I shared in issue 10. What happens when the state is the aggressor?
🇮🇳 I like the idea of creating a connected story through a series of murals in the public space. Waste management is an important topic, too. But is Nestlé doing artwashing?
🇧🇷 A new Brazilian web platform promotes African philosophy and advocates for stronger cultural South-South relations. Check out filosofia africana!
🇳🇬🇩🇪 It’s actually pretty nice to see an act of making things right be accompanied by genuine interest for improved cultural relations. Restitution - full steam ahead!
🇰🇭 Meanwhile, the Pandora Papers reveal widespread sales of looted Cambodian artefacts with falsified provenance papers, and the Met plays ‘catch me if you can’.
🇬🇧🇬🇹 How to do things differently then? Well, Tate acquired a 13-year custodianship of a Mayan artwork and the corresponding ritual instead of stealing or buying it.
🇸🇾 Just because Syria is still a major mess, research on artistic production has not stopped as this excellent selection of research proposals via Ettijahat shows.
🇿🇦 Independent theatres are incredibly important for communities historically excluded from access to the arts. Period. South Africa shows us how it’s done.
💡 Innovate for what? 🧐
How often do you read a request for grant proposals, a policy memo or a funding guideline that requests innovation as a central criterion? You’re not alone.
Incidentally, my little social media echo chamber and reading pipeline were right there with me. Innovation cannot and should not be the sole criterion for funding or determining an initiative's impact. Innovation is a process. And while I agree that funding processes, institutional development, and R&D would be pretty amazing, funders rarely do see it that way. They want to fund implementation of an innovation but rarely the way to get there.
That brings us to the next question of what innovation really means? For many, it seems, technology equals innovation (anybody been watching the COP debates?). This scares me. If innovation is truly about shifting the status quo, every little shift, no matter how we reached it, would be innovative, wouldn’t it? Doing or making something entirely new looks flashy and interesting but remixing or adapting what’s already out there might not only be more impactful, it likely is more sustainable, too. Zainab Kakal’s newsletter has some brilliant thoughts on doing innovation right, if you want to read more.
What prompted me to think about innovation in culture and development is how simple, tested business models can be turned around to serve not just shareholders but communities. Humanitix, for example, is an online ticketing service that channels profits back into the community. Artspay is payment gateway provider that funds artistic initiatives with company profits. Where else can we redirect profits of necessary service intermediaries into culture or other development and community initiatives? Where is the next Ecosia for the arts? What about an email provider for cultural development? I mean, there are already nonprofit housing developers out there. What else can we achieve when we simply reject the idea of individual profit for common benefit? Isn’t that innovation? And wouldn’t the arts be front and centre in such a logic model?
In a way, taking tested models and applying it in a different context might even save you from failure whilst centring learning and adaptation. Take this passionate call to ‘dumb’ down our cities, for example. If we can make our cities low-tech and take inspiration from nature and ancient human wisdom, we might solve some of the most pressing issues that come with increasing urbanisation. I guess we are always drawn to the new and flashy, but there is so much richness in our very own natural and cultural heritage.
And then, there is the issue of who does innovation. Yuen Yuen Ang gives some pretty simple but fascinating examples of where and how innovation happens in globally disadvantaged communities all the time. Her analysis is spot on:
Putting all this together, there are two striking flaws in mainstream political economy of development. The first is a lack of appreciation for innovation among ground-level actors, particularly in developing countries. […]
The second flaw is a failure to distinguish between the factors and institutions that help markets take off and those that sustain them.
So, let's not use innovation as an end in itself and really open our minds to what innovation can be in terms of tools or ways of thinking. Let’s also remember that funding what works is often the hardest thing, even though what works has probably seen a lot of innovation gone into it already as it has been constantly adapting and shifting. We need to acknowledge that recycling, remixing and adapting is most definitely innovation and that our bias often prevents us from seeing that the most unlikely can be most astute innovators. Quoting Nadine’s tweet here as a call to funders, “Be helpful, be transparent…”
IMPACT
📏 Beneficial, robust, people-centred, and connected. These are the four central Evaluation Principles the Centre for Cultural Value came up with, each with three sub-principles that include general guidance as well as recommendations for some parties involved in an evaluation (organisation, evaluator, funder) on how to implement them. This is straight up a great guidance for evaluators operating in the creative space (even when the majority of principles are probably true for any evaluator really). And they are broad enough to be applied to most contexts, too. Solid work!
💤 Boring is ok. Also, check your power trip if you’re a grantmaker. This is just a short reflection of a (former) programme officer in a grantmaking institution but it all rings so true. Dana Schmidt is taking philanthropy folks by the hand to understand why we’re sometimes acting the way we do and how we can really use our vantage point and position of privilege. Always good to check in the mirror whether you have become that over-demanding and over-involved individual creating funding hell for your grantees.
💡 No wonder nobody is interested in our evidence for cultural policy making. In her latest research paper, Eli Belfiore opens a window into the policymaking process, and shows us why shoddy and opaque economic impact assessments of cultural policy fly as evidence. Frustrating as that may be, evidence needs to fit into a policy frame, a political direction of sorts to even be considered. Then the idea of impact can flourish, even though this doesn’t keep bad research from finding its way into the policy rhetoric. So what did we learn? Know your politics before you start your advocacy. Fascinating read for those more theoretically inclined.
RESEARCH | REPORTS | TOOLKITS
🥚 You want peace, you need culture. Cultural Relations - Key Approaches in Fragile Contexts by Jordi Baltà Portolés is the definitive Culture and Peace 101 for foreign cultural relations actors. It’s very technical, very comprehensive in its mapping of definitions, policies and approaches of different European cultural relations institutes, and very important. For decision makers at EU and member state level, this should be the guidebook for more cooperation and concerted approaches on how to work with and through culture in fragile contexts. I love how this report acknowledges so many different dimensions and does not shy away from the complexity that culture in peacebuilding and sustainable development usually presents us with.
🌍 Creative economies flourish where you learn and where you gather. Meaning, institutions of higher education, co-working spaces and creative hubs play a key role in various African countries’ creative economies. Such intermediaries are also important to define the local development agendas. That’s what Understanding and Supporting Creative Economies in Africa: Education, Networks and Policy: A policy report finds in its zoom-in on Nairobi, Lagos and Cape Town. What bothers me a little is that for the most part this policy report reads like a 36-pages long teaser for two academic books from the same research project that are not yet released.
📈 Culture in sustainable development is on the rise. EUNIC and its National Cultural Institutes want to do more for culture in the SDGs: more advocacy, more partnerships, more effectiveness. They also acknowledge that SDG-washing is a thing and want to stay away from that - good on you! What I am most excited about, though, is the strong focus on developing M&E frameworks, designing core indicators and evaluation tools relevant for cultural relations, and creating a EUNIC Working Group on SDG evaluation. And if by any chance you need someone who has a truckload of opinions on this, let me know!
MEANWHILE ON TWITTER
LIMINAL SPACE
📝 Arts ecosystems need criticism. Nabilah Said talks on Splice Lo-Fi about a 360-approach to her work at ArtsEquator, doing a special kind of development: You need to strengthen arts criticism and reviewing to develop arts ecosystems, and you need to nurture ecosystems to share critical perspectives on development. As you listen to Nabilah in this podcast as she describes how exactly to nurture such an ecosystem, you’ve got about enough time for a quick 5k dash around the block after work.
🍳 Food can unite people, if only they were afforded humanity. N.A. Mansour’s view on the refugee cookbook as a genre shows us how inherently political cookbooks are: Stir privileged access to resources into a thick paste of resilience narratives and season it with a pinch of trauma porn. This is a great article outlining the problematic nature of cookbooks that centre around refugees, and how this attempt at culinary cultural relations often fails as people are not seen as such but as mere representations of their status or experiences.
↕️ The Global South is relational, not monolithic. Researcher Sebastian Haug has us reflect on when and why we should use the term Global South and also shouldn’t. Guilty as charged - I have been using the term not just as a relational category implying structural power imbalances but often used it as blanket terminology. Curator Thiago de Paula Souza describes the Global South as diverse and not monolithic whilst acknowledging further power dynamics within the Global South. More food for thought when trying to blanket-frame an already ill-defined region conceptually.
OPPORTUNITIES
8 Nov - 6 Dec: an artistic toolkit for the apocalypse: using creativity to navigate existential threats (online course)
🌀 Just by the looks of it, this online course is a piece of art in itself: “The class will be looking at doomsday scenarios through the prism of science, technology and art. Each week, we will discuss the works of artists, designers and other creative minds who navigate apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives or who simply acquaint themselves with surviving skills.” Does that mean we could use art to become collaborative preppers? I’m so very intrigued.
12 Nov: FondosCultura: Writing grant proposals to unlock cultural funding (online training course)
💸 I guess the EU and UNESCO know how complicated their own funding application mechanisms are (although I’ve got to admit that I really like the logic of the IFCD grant application spreadsheet), so they set up a training to learn how to write a decent grant proposal. If you’re from the Caribbean, got 36 hours (pretty comprehensive, no?) and want to learn the honourable craft of getting them dollars, sign up?
12 & 19 Nov: Business of Handmade Study Group
🧶 I featured the excellent Business of Handmade research in curious patterns #13. Based on this research, 200 Million Artisans in cooperation with The New School will host two free online study groups on models of intellectual property and its protection in the artisan economy, exploring issues of IP in design co-creation and tradition in IP. Experts from Indian artisan groups will join, so get amongst it!
3 Dec: UNESCO-Aschberg programme for artists and cultural professionals (call for projects)
🤝 Status of the artist. Social protection. Cultural policy. Legal reform. Research. Consultation. Awareness-raising. Other buzzwords. Technical assistance. No cash. Both governments and civil society. Jokes aside - this is actually a very relevant programme to assist governments and CSOs to work together in creating better outcomes for artists, especially when there is already a solid foundation for cooperation and exchange.
Ongoing: ResiliArt for Mondicult (call for online conferences)
🌐 2022 is Mondicult year! 40 years after Mexico City, the UNESCO World Conference on Cultural Policies and Sustainable Development is going to take stock. And we’re all invited … to organise some online conferences in the run-up to the conferences, that is. If you’re keen to get a UNESCO label for your gathering, here are some useful tips how to organise your very own ResiliArt debate. Send me a message if you do, and I can share your event through curious patterns.
Please forward this newsletter to a friend, and do reach out: kai@edgeandstory.com