curious patterns #19
The ethics of social change in arts programmes, the ethics of grantmaking, the ethics of evaluation, and also some unethical stuff.
curious patterns is a monthly email newsletter on all things culture, impact and development, written by Kai Brennert (Twitter) from edge and story.
I seem to have fallen into a six-week-ish publishing cadence now. There is just so much going on. And I’m afraid it might slow down even more because I am on my first big work trip since the before-days. From now until mid-June, I will mostly be in Berlin and Kaunas, checking out the Creative Bureaucracy Festival, immersing myself in contemporary circus at Cirkuliacija Festival, and meeting beautiful people along the way. If anybody wants to meet up for a coffee or a beer while I’m in Europe, let me know – I would love to meet some likeminded souls 🍻
New subscribers at UNDP 🇰🇭, Creative Bureaucracy Festival 🇩🇪, Le Monastère 🇨🇦, Heather Mak Consulting 🇨🇦, BOP Consulting 🇬🇧, NalandaWay Foundation 🇮🇳, and NationSwell 🇺🇸 – thank you 🙏
🇹🇭🥭 Perform at Coachella, eat mango sticky rice on stage, start a global craze. That’s how you do cultural x culinary diplomacy. Now, Thailand wants it protected.
🇲🇽 You gotta give it to these Mexican cultural activists – subversive AND fun. Some swapped out audio guides in a museum, another one just licked the objects.
🇺🇦 I love Notion for its simplicity, and here it really shines. The Ukrainian government uses the platform to document cultural war crimes. Found something? Go submit!
📱 Shazam, but for performance rights organisations. If made mandatory, this digital-meets-analog startup could be a royalty game-changer for musicians.
🇵🇰 Let’s not dwell on the pros and cons of a national artist register for a moment. Let’s admire Pakistan’s optimism instead. RIP pakistancreatives@gmail.com!
🇬🇭 Creativity and critical thinking taught from primary school onward as a funnel for creative industries. And investments. And IP protection. UNDP seems to be on the job.
🇩🇪 documenta 15, curated by Indonesian collective ruangrupa, has put together a phenomenal line-up of Global South artists. But Germany is still very German about it.
🇵🇭 If you want to learn how one of the most promising markets in Southeast Asia embraces creative industries, read this primer! Trust me, it’s worth the sign-up.
🎧 I still haven’t fully grasped the appeal of a Fortnite in-game concert, but Egyptian pop stars apparently have. MENA experienced 35% growth of music revenue in 2021.
🇾🇪 Borrowing cash-for-work concepts from humanitarian aid and making it work for cultural heritage protection. That’s what UNESCO and the EU are doing in Yemen.
🤖 If we weren’t in enough shit already, we’re now looking at a new colonial world order propelled by artificial intelligence. Can we figure decolonial AI out fast, please?
🌍 Across Africa, creative industries embrace environmental sustainability. From architecture and fashion to recycled materials, there’s a lot to love.
Give them agency!
Over the past couple of months working on social impact art projects, participating in various fellowships, and having conversations with colleagues in the development space, words of François Matarasso kept coming back to me. I had previously shared his and Arlene Goldbard’s Ethics and Participatory Art in curious patterns #9, but sometimes these thoughts need time to marinate. Increasingly, I have been wondering how often we actually communicate our intentions to those that we work with, and by that I mean programme participants, our target audiences.
What right does one person have to try to change another? That question becomes even more difficult when participants — whom I have often seen described in proposals as the ‘target’ audience or community — are unaware of the change that this music or theatre project is supposed to have on them. Good intentions cannot change the nature of such manipulative processes.
– François Matarasso (2021): Art and Community
So here’s a plea for freely accessible theory of changes and logic models of your programmes that provide transparency and transfer agency to those that you seek to change. Communicate your intention to your participants, don’t treat them as mere objects of your change intervention. Value them as subjects who are not only intelligent enough to position themselves and their motivation in your programme but also deserve to know what you intend to do with and/or for them so that they can make an informed decision whether and how they want to be part of it.
Everything else, quite frankly, is unethical. And yes, often this is political, especially when government funds are involved that favour certain activities because they hope for specific outcomes (you know, civic engagement, deradicalisation, embrace of preferred values). The work of culture in development will always have an instrumental element to it, so communicate it. I appeal to you to take your beneficiaries seriously (in this context it might also be worth revisiting what we actually mean by that) and spell out what the heck it is you hope to achieve. Perhaps the dialogue around these goals creates an even more impactful programme because you encourage agency. Or perhaps people start questioning what you do – and that’s good! That’s how you start becoming a good partner, a fair collaborator and a better programmer.
Think about it:
First step: make publicly available your logic model, theories of change, and indicator frameworks.
Second step: communicate your intentions, your instruments (i.e. your design) and your intended outcomes in easy terms to the people you work with.
Third step: listen to these very people, hear their feedback and their needs, and engage them in your programme design.
Fourth step: share what you have learned and how you have adapted; others might learn from it as well.
🤬 Sharing my own tweet here because it deserves some attention – sorry not sorry. The European External Action Service (EEAS) seems to think that arts and culture are great for the optics but shouldn’t cost anything. Look at the original T&Cs here. Sadly, this is far from the only call of this nature.
IMPACT
🪞 Grantmakers reflecting on their practice - I like. Voice is described as a grant facility and run by the local Hivos and Oxfam offices in the countries they serve. People and organisations working in their own (marginalised) communities are at the centre. Apart from hearing about how great this initial framing of the grants is received by organisations and how equally painful Oxfam’s reporting requirements are, I haven’t had much interaction with Voice. But reading this reflection by Ruth Kimani and Sheila Mulli really resonates:
The unfortunate effect of not asking enough questions is poor decision-making and assuming that we know what is needed for societies to thrive.
Has development aid disrupted this sense of community with a set of rules that has promoted competition for resources?
Voice has been very open to cultural and creative projects. Here’s hoping that other grantmakers recognise these approaches, too. Perhaps even at scale? 😊
🧐 But what about evaluators? Now that we talked about an ethical shift in grantmaking, let’s look at the world of evaluation. The Equitable Evaluation Initiative has taken it upon themselves to take the evaluation sector on a journey of self-reflection. As a starting point, you will find a list of evaluation orthodoxies that are to be challenged – and yes, they must be!
We are then asked to consider our positionality, recognise different ways of knowing, acknowledge contexts and value sets, and observe how we engage with uncertainty, failure and our own vulnerability. This is simplified to the max, so please please please read Shifting the Evaluation Paradigm: The Equitable Evaluation Framework (EEF)™. This evolving work is not only fascinating but I would say crucial for everyone involved in evaluation. And if you’re still hesitant, say this quote from the publication loud and clear:
The “work” begins with you, right now, where you are.
ART IN BETWEEN
📕 keeping you is no gain / losing you is no loss – This phrase was common during the devastating four years of Khmer Rouge rule in 🇰🇭 Cambodia in the late 1970s, and it shows their horrific contempt for human life. An estimated two million people lost their lives, many without accompanying burial rites.
When I joined the amazing NGO Cambodian Living Arts in 2015, they were just starting to prepare a major stage production of a piece of music they had commissioned, Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia. I got involved and helped to coordinate things, being in a deep state of awe of the musical beauty and the mission of the piece: to heal and give hope to survivors of violent conflict.
An essential act of memory, reconciliation, and peace.
During a small world tour, Bangsokol was recorded by Metropolis Ensemble, the Taipei Philharmonic Chamber Choir, and the Cambodian ensemble surrounding composer Him Sophy at the iconic National Sawdust in New York in 2017. I am so happy to be able to share this music with you now. Please reserve an hour to listen to Bangsokol, read about its background, allow it the space it deserves 🙏
RESEARCH | REPORTS | TOOLKITS
🤖 Industry 4.0 is coming for us. If we want it or not. This new UNCTAD report is one big literature review, and a brainy one at that. If you’re into measuring the creative industries’ economic value, its underpinning concepts, and limitations, that’s your publication. Also take a look if you want to learn what industry 4.0 holds in store for the creative economy. And if trade is your thing, you’ll also find something. Here are some of my takeaways: 1) Measuring the extent of the global creative economy is messy. 2) Asia-Pacific is a frickin’ massive market for CCIs. 3) The handicraft sector will grow massively over the next five years. 4) Improvements in artificial intelligence, manufacturing, and automation will threaten the human element in that very handicraft sector. 5) Digitalised tools will be cheaper and more readily available, levelling the playing field for creatives, or so they hope. 6) We need to find better models for capturing intangible capital and spillovers. 7) I have a hell-of-a-lot of reading to do to better understand cultural economics and trade. That stuff is intense.
✊ It's toolkit time – give it up for Arts Activism! This practice-oriented publication delights with learnings and activities from eight different case studies, from Zimbabwe via Bangladesh all the way to Canada. What makes this toolkit by Aylwyn Walsh, Paul Routledge and Alex Sutherland quite precious is the vast diversity of approaches. One moment you’re learning what call and response can do in a protest, the next you’re reading about fake news awareness before having your eyes glued to various mapping and reflection exercises. This is a great, playful introduction to those wanting to do more activism through artistic means. In solidarity!
🌎 Creative policy approaches all around. I have never been to the Caribbean or the Americas (other than that place with the gun problem). So, this publication by the Inter-American Development Bank on Public Funding for Culture and Creativity in Latin America and the Caribbean comes as a brilliant primer for a cultural policy geek like me. It’s super well structured and provides heaps of examples in the respective countries. I can now proudly say that I know that Costa Rica has the highest public culture expenditure relative to its national budget, Uruguay is giving out R&D grants in the creative industries, Colombia provides special orange investment bonds for the sector, and Brazil gives out culture vouchers for below-minimum wage workers. And the usual Groundhog Day realisation: more impact evaluation of policies are needed.
🤝 And here’s a little bonus as I was just working on a grant proposal for a rural town in Eastern Germany on social-ecological transformation and thought this fit really well: The Illustrated Guide to Participatory City. Brilliant example of a well-researched, superbly visualised toolkit 🙃
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LIMINAL SPACE
🇵🇼 E-residency is a real thing. How do I know? Well, I myself am an Estonian e-resident and have my company registered there. But that’s not the topic (feel free to reach out if you want to know more). The latest place to offer a form of digital residency is Palau. If you sign up and get approved, you get access to some public services. Why is this relevant? You also get to hide under Palauan jurisdiction if your physical residency is a bit more, let’s say conservative. This could be an opportunity for artists to sell NFTs if they legally couldn’t use crypto in their own countries, for example, but I feel digital residencies could also increasingly become an option for those displaced and disowned. Atossa Araxia Abrahamian has the deep dive for us in her excellent newsletter Terra Nullius.
⛑ Fall in love with the problem, not the solution. And design for relevance, not growth. This is the first naked truth of humanitarian aid innovator Paula Gil Baizan who most recently worked at the Norwegian Refugee Council. Lesson #2 is about not forgetting the institutional constraints, and perhaps innovating them first. Point #3 is realising that scale is not everything, that you might be hated, and that that’s ok.
The naked truth is that spaces for people who use imagination and creativity to challenge the status quo of aid have become constrained over time by the demands for immediate results and instant gratification. We need more creatives in leadership roles to open them up.
DID YOU KNOW?
🇯🇵 In Japan, there is a café for writers on a deadline that won’t let you leave until you finish your manuscript. The owner checks on you hourly. We all know that’s a genius idea – don’t lie to yourself. But oh my, just think of the atmosphere in that shop 😆
OPPORTUNITIES
By 1 Sep: Living Heritage and Sustainable Development (online course)
💻 UNESCO is entering the MOOC space with a course on ICH and the SDGs. If you have no idea what I am on about with all these ghastly acronyms, I invite you to check the course overview on the edX platform. They use much fewer acronyms. Promise. The course itself has three introductory modules and three that focus on a bunch of specific Sustainable Development Goals, including gender, peace, climate change, decent work and more. Self-paced, diverse instructor body, looks great from the outside. Please share if you take the course and have opinions.
Please forward this newsletter to a friend, and do reach out: kai@edgeandstory.com