curious patterns #16
Africa's creative economy moment, an indigenous data analysis framework, and the power of making money a community issue.
curious patterns is a monthly email newsletter on all things culture, impact and development, written by Kai Brennert (Twitter | edge & story).
What a whirlwind year 2021 has been. Left beautiful Aotearoa for the next chapter, was reunited with family after two years, started my consultancy edge & story, relocated home to Cambodia, managed to run 5km in under 30 minutes for the first time, became an SIF Arts for Good Fellow and participated in the EU's Global Cultural Relations Programme. And I am incredibly chuffed for the amazing projects and organisations I'll get to work with in the coming year. We're talking evaluation co-design, freedom of expression, South-South cultural cooperation, creative indicator frameworks, and futures of sustainable development. Excited? Me too 🥰
May 2022 be a crackin’ year for all of you!
A massive thank you goes out to the swarm of new subscribers at ICR Research 🇬🇧, Royal Alberta Museum 🇨🇦, Goethe-Institut 🇩🇪, Museum MACAN 🇮🇩, International Society for Contemporary Music 🇦🇹, British Council 🇬🇧, Solar 🇵🇪, University of West Scotland 🏴, Hausa International Book and Arts Festival 🇳🇬, Participant Media 🇺🇸, Libraries Without Borders 🇺🇸, the University of Manchester 🇬🇧, Western Colorado University 🇺🇸, AEA Consulting 🇺🇸, the Centre for Responsible Tourism Singapore 🇸🇬.
🌍 The African Union has picked up the ball and is trying to build inter-African cooperation for and a strong position toward restitution of cultural heritage. Go AU!
🇨🇮 Côte d’Ivoire has a seriously cool new approach to tackling piracy: tax imports of all media that can hold audiovisual data and establish a culture fund with the spoils.
🏗 How to make cultural and creative industries a feasible development option? Evoke non-alignment and harmonise standards. At least, I think that’s what they mean.
🇰🇿 250 new cultural facilities, 92.5% population reach, 75% satisfaction - all within the next 3 years. How’s that for KPIs? Kazakhstan says go big or go home.
🌏 If you want to feel the pulse of where ASEAN is going with its creative economy development, check out the latest issue of ASEAN Magazine, supported through GIZ.
🇿🇼 Still don’t know what an NFT is and how artists can benefit from it? Read about Zimbabwean artist Hulio’s success and how getting the cash is a whole different story.
🇦🇲🇦🇿 If UNESCO can’t stop heritage destruction, perhaps the International Court of Justice can. The measures are the next step in the long Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict.
🇰🇭 While the more outspoken environmental activists get arrested in Cambodia, some artists have found their niche of quiet civic engagement. Some of my favourites!
🇺🇳 PSA: The latest issue of UNESCO’s Culture & Public Policy Tracker has a pretty neat overview of culture and sustainable development, chock-full of policy links.
🇺🇳 And while we’re doing UN business, the GA only just adopted a resolution that puts a report on culture and sustainable development in the pipeline for 2023.
🐷 When money means community
There are those things that you find incredibly fascinating on a theoretical level but rarely get to experience in action. You know what I am talking about. For me, that thing is participatory grantmaking and co-budgeting. I have been looking into these practices for more than a year now and even put together a sweet little research dossier for my former employer. I guess that counted as manifestation somehow because I got lucky not too long ago when my participation in the recent EU Global Cultural Relations Programme gave me my first real taste.
As part of the programme, we engaged in a form of participatory grantmaking, allocating a fixed amount of money among the projects that programme participants had designed. We went through multiple iterations to make sure it would be somewhat fair, taking into account all the different group dynamics and project setups: first we allocated a fixed budget to a finite amount of projects, then ranked projects by expected impact, and voted on central guidance such as ‘allocate ideal funding amount to projects and risk funding fewer projects’ or ‘allocate the minimum viable funding amount and allow more projects to be funded’. That all proved to be fascinating as well as frustrating at times. It’s as much about community as it is about yourself. No surprise that everyone was super invested.
When thinking about democratising funding relationships, the act of funders passing on power to those that actually create the change they want to see is a super promising step. We’d be creating different avenues of accountability (horizontal, not just vertical) and hopefully further encourage collaboration. Of course, the whole spectacle is resource-intensive, but then so are traditional grant applications.
Participatory grantmaking comes in many shapes and sizes. For example, there are concepts of inviting former grantees to become the next cohort of funding committee members (be mindful of clientelism) and the closed collective idea as we practiced it with the GCRP folks (if the foundation for collaboration was laid successfully). Of course, the more open the better. Here’s a good overview of various modes.
A participatory approach does not need to be limited to funds that go out to recipients, though. There have been several experiments of co-budgeting that go beyond simple project funding (which in itself is problematic - multi-year operational cash is what’s needed, but that’s a story for another day). Think about local governments, where citizens are invited to co-budget or create shadow budgets. I can also see this being applied on a ministerial level, which would help governments identify public priorities for a certain portfolio. Organisations might benefit from giving employees a chance to share their expertise and passion beyond their departments through a co-budgeting opportunity.
If you want to get an idea how this could work in action, indulge in these resources:
Cobudget - an app to facilitate co-budgeting in organisations
Open Collective - an app for transparent and collaborative money management within groups
Now, what promises does that hold for arts and culture in the context of sustainable development?
Money and impact are related (not quite so clear-cut, but no money often means that relevant impact simply cannot be achieved or scaled), so we need to pay attention to who allocates money and how it is being allocated, what narratives dominate and what types of impact are even on the agenda. All of this needs open dialogue.
We need to involve cultural workers as sensemakers in budgeting processes, not just for the their own sector but beyond that as they bring a cultural and societal dimension into the most technical of issues. And we urgently need more in-depth cross-sectoral collaboration if we want to address the problems of our times holistically. Allocating the money that allows us to do this work seems like a good starting point.
And slightly more inward-looking: If you are an organisation and have done top-down budgeting forever because … that’s how it’s always been done, why not experiment with giving your staff, your beneficiaries, your stakeholders a chance to be part of your impact journey? Who knows what perspectives, skills and opportunities you might discover in the process?
IMPACT
🌀 Your data is not static or fixed, but a living system of knowledge patterned on creation. This sentence is from an article I won’t even attempt to describe other than at its very core it demands a holistic way of engaging with data, not just in collection but also in analysis. Thought Ritual: An Indigenous Data Analysis Method for Research by Donna Moodie and Tyson Yunkaporta, the latter of whom I already featured in curious patterns #12, offers a framework that everyone working with data should at least think through once. Do yourself a favour and read this article!
🌘 If you want to advocate for the nighttime economy, make sure that your data has time stamps. I know, that’s an easy catch, but I’m sure gets forgotten way too often. Good on you, VibeLab. This chapter of the Global Nighttime Recovery Plan is a one-stop shop for all your data advocacy needs: From indicator development, potential data sources and collection methods to analysis and data storytelling. It’s noteworthy that data privacy gets a little extra attention assuming that people out at night deserve special protection.
🦸 We all have read them, we all have trolled them - creative economy reports. These pieces of work that tend to use data to make promises from growth in tourist numbers to the resurrection of the (creative) messiah and everything in between. Next time you read one of these, see if you can spot the hero and the villain of the story, or try to identify the story arc of the report. I really quite like this playful analytical lens called Narrative Policy Framework that Goldberg-Miller and Skaggs introduce us to in order to find the policy value in the story of the data.
🚨 curious patterns is a passion project. And since passion never stops, I would love to continue developing the newsletter and potentially explore other forms of content creation, too. If you have approximately 3 minutes time and you want to be a shaping force of what happens next in this space, I’d appreciate some feedback. Go ham!
🌍 ALL EYES ON AFRICA
African cultural and creative industries need investment and intra-African cooperation, not foreign know-how
A wealth of reports and article have recently been published that shine a very bright light on the energy and potential of the African continent’s cultural and creative industries for the next years. But we need to get away from the assistance mindset, and favour investment in local resources - at least that’s what everything’s pointing at.
Rather than engaging with Africa’s cultural sector through a singular lens, what if the world looked to it as a source of innovation and instruction?
In her article, Charlotte Ashamu illustrates how several African cultural institutions have been uniquely able to engage broad audiences and break down barriers that are all too well known to cultural institutions in the Global North. Fascinating examples from Morocco and Benin show that a shared meal or a dedicated event for school teachers can be game changers for museums and audience development.
Similarly in Lagos, Tokini Peterside introduced contemporary art to people that have not been part of that community before by showing up for the them. The ART x Lagos art fair was founded partly to help artists benefit from a stronger arts ecosystem but also to give Nigerians a place for cultural resonance, especially in light of recent social and political challenges.
We can’t just present art in a beautiful state, away from the broader context of our society, because the fair is also a reflection of the mood and the spirit of Lagos.
All the while, markets are growing, creating opportunities for institutions and creatives alike. There are more local collectors and more frequent visual art sales, music and film streaming numbers are on the rise, and local content is starting to see significant exports. The International Finance Corporation sees vast opportunities facilitated by new subsea cables that bring faster internet as well as the African Continental Free Trade Agreement that should ease intra-African trade of cultural goods and services.
What is needed is access to capital and pro-active investment. Afrique créative is an accelerator for African CCIs which is funded by AFD, the French development agency. This short little publication wants to get the attention of investors and demonstrates the many potentials of the sector. The specific cases around IP and the primacy of supply over demand in which investors could make a difference are pretty interesting, but will they be enough to convince the folks with cash to take the risk?
UNESCO provides the numbers, for the audiovisual sector at least. This report on the African film industry features a wealth of data in the form of a regional analysis, country mappings alongside recommendations of four growth models complete with action points for policymakers: Would you like the Nollywood model, the Auteur model, the Service model, or the Festival model perhaps?
There is no denying the pulsating energy surrounding cultural and creative industries in many African countries right about now. All these ambitions and potentials are encapsulated in Ojoma Ochai’s outlook for the African creative economy in 2022: more intra-African cooperation, more investment, better use of new technologies, more useful research, broader skillsets among cultural workers, and more convening spaces across the continent.
This needs to be a year that we make strategic choices as a continent and as individual countries, to collaboratively leverage our Creative Economies — for economic growth and COVID-19 recovery, but also to express our culture and identity and share our world views with each other and with well… the world!
Evidently, the talent is ready and passion is overflowing. Now it’s time for investors and policymakers to follow suit, and for cultural and political actors on the continent to beef up its cooperation channels. Not just to grow CCIs but to show up for the people of Africa. As for the international community, Charlotte Ashamu has a suggestion:
I hope that there will be fewer token gestures and more transformation in the way the world understands and engages with Africa’s cultural institutions.
LIMINAL SPACE
🔮 We got a situation, bring in the futurists! I am absolutely certain this is how the crisis team at UNHCR must have reacted to the growing humanitarian clusterfuck that we are living through these days. Jokes aside, Project Unsung is a brilliant example of inviting creativity and art into a space dominated by technical solutions and reactive behaviour. It’s a collection of stories for the future of humanitarian work, through the lens of speculative design and art. There’s a bunch of great content, like this essay on arts to imagine social futures, but the speculative work is where it gets really fascinating. I adore the Homecoming Museum and also had a good chuckle at the Invoices for Climate Reparations. Take some time and wander around. I really hope these imaginations are going to be used within the wider organisation, too.
📚 How to facilitate loving conversations? Rather than an open chat or a moderated discussion, ArtsEquator invited the writers of the international digital collaborative residency program WrICE 2021 to go around the (Zoom) room and ask a fellow writer one question, who in turn gets to ask one question to another writer. You’ll learn about the people and their way of thinking from the answers as much as from the questions. I love this format!
OPPORTUNITIES
14 March: WIPO Global Awards (call for submissions)
🧠 Intellectual property x commercial success x positive (cultural) impact. That’s pretty much what this award by the World Intellectual Property Organisation is about. If you are a small or medium sized business and have successfully commercialised your IP whilst creating positive impact, this might be worth a look. No cash prize (booh 👎) but mentorship and access to funding and partnership opportunities.
Ongoing: Creating Meaningful and Inclusive Museum Practices (online course)
🏛✊ Two out of the three instructors of this free online course identify as activists - promising! And all of them have extensive experience working in the heritage and museum space both in the Global North and South. Seriously, this looks like a dope MOOC opportunity for all those museum-inclined folks among you.
Please forward this newsletter to a friend, and do reach out: kai@edgeandstory.com