curious patterns #17
Thoughts on green authoritarian cultural policies, arts-based evaluation methods, and insect protein shakes.
curious patterns is a monthly email newsletter on all things culture, impact and development, written by Kai Brennert (Twitter | edge & story).
While the January news cycle was a bit slower than usual, my work schedule was pretty nuts. Perhaps I should follow some of the ideas in Jenny Odell’s “How to do nothing”, which is just finished…
Contrary to any how to do nothing advice, I have recently set up a Telegram group to share and discuss cultural policy developments in Southeast Asia. If you’re keen to join the group, drop me a message and I’ll send the group invite your way.
A very warm welcome to new subscribers at Ohio State University 🇺🇸, IMZ International Music + Media Centre 🇦🇹, Plan International 🇺🇦, The Good Ship 🇬🇧, Forecast Public Arts 🇺🇸, and Antidote Music 🇸🇿
🇮🇩 The big proponent of the Creative Cities movement has a new and rather granular obsession: Creative Villages. Mind you, there are 83,820 of them in Indonesia.
📢 One of my climate fiction heroes, Amitav Ghosh, is speaking truth to power: European colonialism and climate change are inextricably linked, and it continues.
🌀 And as the aid sector perpetuates post-colonial inequities, the need for indigenous philosophies keeps re-surfacing. Because, whose impact is it anyway?
🇺🇿 Having a cultural out-of-body experience but online. Three ambitious Minecrafters rebuilt the Samarkand Registan, and they have plans for even more historic buildings.
☑️ curious patterns wants to hear from you!
🇬🇦 Before you know what to do, you need to know what you’re dealing with, or whom. So, Gabon is doing some inventorying. Artist, orgs, heritage - the whole shebang.
🔮 Increasingly profit-driven, more involved in social innovation, and dispersed on many independent platforms. This and more in the Future of Arts & Culture.
🇦🇴 A dedicated radio station for arts and culture - amazeballs! Wanting to instil values of national identity - meh. The proposal sounds pretty promising, though.
🇺🇸 From cathedrals to town squares, and why equitable design of cultural spaces need to be front and centre in placemaking. Seems logical, but we all know what’s up.
🇾🇪 In an effort to promote peaceful coexistence in Yemen, GIZ released a beautiful culture-focused magazine. Meanwhile, Yemen’s internet access remains fragile.
And - absolutely not to be missed - UNESCO just launched its latest global report Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity. I will sink my teeth into the report over the next weeks and share my reflections with you in the next edition of curious patterns. Meanwhile, you might want to have a sneak peek yourself:
📔 The report: Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity: Addressing Culture as Public Good
🎥 The launch: Launch of the Global Report Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity
📰 The first journalistic response: Unesco warns of crisis in creative sector with 10m jobs lost due to pandemic
🙏 Please force us?
Have you watched Don’t Look Up, Netflix’ little parable on climate change? It’s as frustratingly simple as it is plausible. Planet Earth as we know it is going to shit and humanity chooses the potential of profit over, well, the potential of life. The main difference is that we have created our real world problem ourselves, and continue to do so knowingly – in the grand scheme of things anyway. On a smaller scale, I have encountered cultural workers and arts organisations that effectively asked for stronger regulations to guide their work into a more climate-friendly direction, while others requested more (economic) freedom to implement the changes needed. This is where it really started messing with my head: what would potential green authoritarianism look like, and what would the implications be for the cultural sector?
The sectoral superiority scenario:
Sure, we’re in a global emergency, but we didn’t cause it and we’re the only ones who can get us out of this. In fact, culture is so good, we need even more of it. If you want to force degrowth on us, brace yourself!
The pragmatic opportunism scenario:
Culture funding has always come attached with political principles and agendas. The flavour of the day is climate change, so we roll with it. Survival is most important, who cares if it’s biological or economic?
The perpetual idealism scenario:
We don’t care if it’s for the greater good and scientifically proven. Any form of authoritarianism is wrong and must be rejected. Will we die in the process? Maybe, but we’ll die alongside our principles.
The right side of history scenario:
Oh snap! If there’s no life, there’s no culture. Let’s rally behind the regulations and turn this ship around. All for one and one for all – freedom is only an illusion anyway.
The please force us scenario:
We know we can’t be trusted to make the radical changes needed for a turnaround ourselves. Please force us and give us no option to wiggle our way out of responsibility.
In a next step, one might want to think about the potential impacts of green authoritarian cultural policies and the people’s response to it. While this thought experiment would obviously touch on every single discipline of policymaking, the case of culture is a curious one that might even hold relevant insights for democratic institutions today. How prescriptive or coercive must a cultural policy be in the face of global crises, and how participatory can it be to achieve the best possible outcome for the planet with humanity on it? Is that even a sliding scale or can coercion and participation somehow complement each other? Perhaps it’s not actually green authoritarianism that I am trying to picture here but rather cultural utilitarianism. What do you think?
IMPACT
✊ Advocacy impact is notoriously hard to measure. So Hivos thought, let’s centre the advocates, their stories and their experiences. They’re not disregarding outcomes entirely, but rather try to construct plausible accounts of contributions to change through these processes, which shall also serve as a learning and communication resource. And yes, sometimes it’s already enough to just see that some people found the courage to stand up for change. They might not have achieved the policy change they wanted but they most certainly have inspired others - and who knows, they might even build on that. I really like the potential this Narrative Assessment method has for the many different ways people tell stories in this world, the cultural richness of the distilled stories, and how multiple narratives can be accommodated.
🎨 If art is central to your social project, why isn’t it to your evaluation? As part of my Arts for Good Fellowship with Singapore International Foundation, I have recently been exploring more arts-based evaluation approaches alongside the dedicated team at India’s NalandaWay Foundation. In this blog post, M&E magician Arushi shares why the organisation is already using arts-based techniques as a method of inquiry to create inclusivity and break away from Western psychometric tools and assessments that are non-contextual, align poorly with normative parameters of populations that we work with, and are generally self-administered.
📖 To get better at evaluating, you need to read more evaluations. Just like with writing, it sharpens your craft. Plus, you’re learning not just on the technical level but also about the programmes themselves. The evaluation report of the Cultural Adaptations project looked at the meetings through the lens of systems, agents and institutions, while the artist placements were evaluated in terms of knowledge exchange impact. All the aspects of your oft-quoted three-legged evaluation stool are there: outcomes, processes and context, which makes for a great learning opportunity. Also, kudos to the organisers and funders that the evaluation report is public - this should be common practice!
RESEARCH | REPORTS | TOOLKITS
🏠 Be like Uruguay. And have a socio-cultural policy that addresses homelessness through art. Or be like Sierra Leone’s WayOut Arts that works over years with street youth to improve mental health and economic opportunities. Or perhaps be like Nigeria’s Slum Art Foundation, which has an art-surance. You get the idea. With Building Transnational Solidarity: Arts & Homelessness in the Global South, Aileen Fry, Chloe Villalobos and Yvette Waweru have done much more than simply addressed the topic at hand. The report looks at root causes, challenges and stigmata whilst shining a bright light on the many brilliant initiatives out there. For me, the additional contextualisation of homelessness is incredibly important – so many things I have not been aware of.
🔔 An ode to fair and flexible funding. For IETM, Milica Ilić and Fatin Farhat have written the ultimate reference book for today’s art funders. Yes, they call out the paradox between being at the pulse of social change and working in archaic systems and relationships, but more importantly, the authors highlight many different aspects in which funders can switch to fairer practices. And there’s an audio version of this report, too - how freakin’ cool is that?! If we were still commuting in 2022, adding industry reports to your e-book library would be the ultimate power move.
LIMINAL SPACE
🦗 Crickets in a protein shake anyone? Great, now that I got your attention, please tune into this podcast. Socially engaged artist Fié Neo invited two Singaporean entrepreneurs with whom she had been working to promote the culinary use of cricket powder. I love how these Insect Protein Pals (hell yeah!) used participatory art in a business context to achieve broader sustainability goals. Think cook-offs and superhero tik toks.
💡 Solving the problems of the Global North. The concept of flipping the development direction and thus narrative power structures is a concept that appeals to me very much. There’s a lot that donor countries and their peoples need to understand about our positionality and how we reinforce neo-colonial systems, knowingly or not. The Ghana ThinkTank project is attempting this. But it remains a concept, an exercise. This critique is more about the way it is set up rather than what it seeks to represent. I have questions about agency.
✏️ Tired of Wordle yet? Of course not. I know. But once that day comes and you need a new fix for your daily procrastination session, you might want to try out this cute minimalist drawing app called minimator. You get a grid, you get a few functions, you get one colour - what else do you need for some minimalist digital doodling? This was me upon first discovery - I call it reverse hokusai in the metaverse:
OPPORTUNITIES
1 March: Global Cultural Relations Programme 2022 (call for applications)
🚀 As my teammates and I from the 2021 edition of the GCRP start to implement our project (get ready for some intense culture x sustainable development action soon), the EU is recruiting for its next round. And this time it’s not virtual so y’all get to fly to Istanbul if you’re selected. Ahhh, those travelling days…
1 March: Prince Claus Seed Awards (call for applications)
🌱 Early career artist? Not yet discovered? From Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean or Eastern Europe? Socially or politically engaged? If you tick those boxes, get your application in to receive 5,000 Euros for your creative practice. Bonus points if you’re experimental, community-based or anti-establishment (at least that’s how I read it). There are 100 of these awards, so share it far and wide.
1 March: Multiply Perspectives (call for applications)
🇨🇭 And another grant opportunity, this time by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. Now, there’s a little more cash on the table here - CHF 25k to be precise - and you’re ideally a consortium of people with diverse perspectives and experiences (one of which must somehow be Swiss to be eligible, though), who are keen to critically reflect on arts and culture and their role in society. And since most of you are doing this kind of work already anyway, I reckon this is a pretty sweet opportunity.
Please forward this newsletter to a friend, and do reach out: kai@edgeandstory.com