curious patterns #20
Let's rethink evaluation in culture and complexity, applaud architectural intermezzi for climate change adaptation, and count down to Mondiacult.
curious patterns is a monthly email newsletter on all things culture, impact and sustainable development, written by Kai Brennert (Twitter) from edge and story.
I’ve been back in Cambodia for quite a few weeks now, but I just didn’t find the time to write this newsletter, or more accurately, read all the stuff that I wanted to cover. I guess that’s what they call a summer break.
Anyhow. My trip was pretty wild and full of insights and inspiration. Heard much about ideas to increase innovation capacity of the public sector and found the magic of contemporary circus, a fascinating and yet so very much under-valued art form. I also had great conversations about non-art collectives, digital transformation and the potential of performance in web3, the rising necessity for sustainable mobility and cyber security, and the ever-growing need of external help of artists and cultural organisations to navigate their respective funding landscapes.
Big shout-out to the folks at University of Otago and University of Tübingen for allowing me to talk to their students about the many roles arts and culture can play in processes of peacebuilding and reconstruction 🙏
Great to see you here, new subscribers from British Council 🇬🇧, Epic Arts 🇰🇭, the European Federation of Professional Circus Schools 🇧🇪, Healdsburg Jazz 🇺🇸, Cabinet Collective 🇩🇪, the U.S. Department of State 🇺🇸, Kossmanndejong 🇳🇱, Te Manawa 🇳🇿, Europe-Asia Center 🇧🇪, woerlpool 🇩🇪, School of International Futures 🇬🇧, and other friends from 🇯🇲 🇸🇬 🇳🇿 🇵🇪 🇨🇦 🇸🇪 🇪🇸🇨🇭.
🇳🇬 Go into a museum, 3D-scan looted objects, mint and sell them as NFTs, then distribute profits to the home arts communities of these looted objects – voilà, Looty.
🇺🇦 Rather than repatriation, Ukraine is trying to prevent looting by digitising and NFTing the heck out of the country’s cultural heritage. Or at least that’s the plan.
🇰🇪 And in Kenya, they are starting the restitution process of heritage objects in foreign collections by creating a major database with all the trimmings. Yum!
💭 Do we need imagination studies? The appeal of looking beyond the visual communication grammar of art to core imagination is certainly there. Also, shrooms.
🔬 Who knew how streamlined OECD research and development data and subsequently funding really was? Here’s a how arts can be more than instrumental.
🇮🇳 Why India needs to empower its artisan economy – self-explanatory title of this policy-forward article really. Also good ideas how the social impact industry can join.
🇺🇸 If you find the American flavour of cultural diplomacy a bit much, listen to this podcast with the founder of the NGO American Voices. I promise, you won’t regret it.
🇮🇶 Talking of podcasts, here’s another great one with Mehiyar Kathem on the good, the bad, and the ugly of cultural heritage policy in Iraq, domestic and international.
🇧🇿 Fascinating story about guitars made from age-old mahogany. A little further, and you’re in a world full of illegal logging and climate change acceleration fueled by art.
🧐 Artists producing creative reflections on an academic paper about a cultural relations approach to international development – pretty meta, pretty cool.
🇬🇭 Pan-Africanism is alive and well in Ghana, and a new museum shall celebrate that. It’s also supposed to host an innovation centre and house repatriated heritage objects.
🦨 When we experience art, there is often more than one sense involved. Now think about experiencing cities through sounds and smells – that’s called sensory urbanism.
🇿🇼 WhatsApp music marketing is a thing. For Zimdancehall artists, this DIY approach is key to reach audiences, build community, and eventually go viral.
⛑ Do humanitarian early warning forecasting mechanisms lack qualitative data? This summary of Geneva’s humanitarian trade fair has some thoughts on that and more.
🇸🇳 Mathematics x heritage x crowdsourced design via social media x handicraft. Transversality at its best! Check out this unique jewelry story from Senegal.
🇩🇴 Don’t you love it when a Ministry of Culture and a National Statistics Office work together? All the nice things we can actually have. Go Dominican Republic!
🎚 The International Finance Corporation tells us how important the creative economy is. No surprise that IP regulation seems to be their only silver policy bullet.
🥊 Are you ready to MONDIACULT?
Not long until the cultural politicians of the world will descend upon Mexico City to discuss the future of the planet, or what is within their remits to do so anyway. I don’t know about you, but I have – possibly very naively – very high hopes for the event to come up with something substantial they are able to feed back into the UNGA as well as their own national government priorities. Seeing all the side-events with lots of input from organised civil society (and many cultural relations agencies) pop up is also encouraging. I hope they can live up to be as inclusive as possible.
Quick reminder for the folks that have no idea what the heck I am on about: MONDIACULT is the first UNESCO World Conference on Cultural Policies and Sustainable Development since 1982, taking place September 28-30 in CDMX. I guess it didn’t seem like an issue the past 40 years, so here we are…
Some interesting stuff in the run up to the big conference that might be of interest:
The past four issues of the UNESCO Tracker on Culture & Public Policy have had a MONDIACULT focus, zooming in on issues such as digital transformation and cultural heritage in the context of sustainable development.
IFACCA has a virtual global open mic for everyone to scream your wants, needs, manifestations and whatever else you need to get off your chest into the world. Submissions close on August 21st.
ASEF is hoping to recalibrate the compass through a series of exchanges around creative ecosystems, culture’s role in addressing the climate crisis, as well as sustainable and fair practices in our sector. Lots of fascinating initiatives featured that I had never heard of.
And if you are interested in the regional nuances of expectations for MONDIACULT, tune into the summaries of UNESCO’s regional consultations. It’s only member states’ views, so expect some politically whitewashed outputs. Nonetheless, some important perspectives.
Interarts summarised key findings from a pre-MONDIACULT consultation hosted by the EU-LAC Foundation (honestly, first time I’m hearing about this foundation), this time with notable non-governmental input as well. Advocacy points are important but not at all surprising if you’ve been around the block once or twice.
Also keep an eye out for the many great fringe events put together around MONDIACULT. Too many to name at this point.
Will I be in CDMX for the event? Hard to say at this point, but probably not. More than anything, it’s just an absolute pain to travel from Southeast Asia to Central America. But who knows what stars might align?! I shall definitely see you online.
IMPACT
🗳 How subversive should evaluation in creative practice be? This is just one of the questions this research survey seeks answers for. You will also be asked how caring evaluation should be, how relevant storytelling is, and whether it should disrupt existing systems. The CreaTures project, Creative Practices for Transformational Futures, is behind this survey and I can’t wait to read the results – they will no doubt be eye-opening. If you haven’t shared your two cents with the researchers, do so here!
🤯 In most cases, evaluation is ill-suited to do its job. Why? Because change in complex systems is rarely explained by looking at things in isolation. Yet, this is something we are asked way too often: come in and get out quickly. And if we are talking something as intangible and multi-faceted as culture, evidence gets even more brittle. To be fair, though, we don’t always have the tools, knowledge or imagination to take everything into account. That’s why I am cautiously enthusiastic for this new UNDP initiative to rethink monitoring and evaluation in complex systems.
🪞 How about internal reflections, then? An important step in the right direction, I would say. Julie’s Bicycle and Artsadmin did exactly that. They sat together, interviewed artists and participants, and looked at some of the hard data available for their Season for Change programme so that they can better understand the impact of their cultural activities on climate change action. It might not be what is generally understood as a rigorous evaluation, but it is this important step of stopping, reflecting and learning that makes all the difference.
ART IN BETWEEN
🇻🇳🎧 Global access, local scenes. I think this is what I find most fascinating listening my way through this impressive overview of Vietnam’s young experimental music scene. It’s a unique mash-up of styles and sounds, entirely unlike what you might know from Indonesia’s famous experimental and noise music scene, for example. It’s really the youth and how unapologetic they are. Give it a shot!
LIMINAL SPACE
🧪 Policy making too boring? Fear not! The UK government, or their Policy Lab to be more precise, has compiled 11 experimental approaches for policy design that could potentially be game changers. Legislative theatre, moral imaginings, DAOs, digital twins, and regenerative design are all on the agenda. You can download and print all that has been developed. Art in policy has a special place and shows us some pretty creative ways of engaging with policy-relevant data. I mean, evidence-based policymaking through the lens of art – yes please!
🔮 Rabbit holes of the future. What is curiosity actually good for if not going down such absolutely endless but super rewarding rabbit holes? In this instance, I got sucked into the world of design. And not just any odd design, but speculative design. Please delight in Core77’s Speculative Design Award Honorees of 2022. May I interest you in some imagination as a commons, or do you fancy a little headspace? Then there is also Project ARCSTAR to help sea ice regeneration. There is plenty to discover.
📚 You only know the value of a library once you don’t have access to it anymore. Something I experienced the hard way. Honestly, it’s baffling to me how amazing public libraries can be. I have been to family history tracing events, I have seen maker spaces with 3D printers, I have accessed rare old copies of stuff, I have used the free internet and washrooms. Libraries can be key community spaces. And Book Bunk in Kenya is taking it to the next level, imagining them as sites of heritage, public art, memory and as critical spaces. How? Watch and read for yourselves. Absolutely brilliant initiative.
DID YOU KNOW?
🌳 Architectural interventions are the new hot shit in climate change adaptation. Or maybe parks have always been the solution – who cares? All I want is to show you these cool new concepts addressing big city problems in the age of climate change. In Korea, the wooden Seoul Loop floating above the city could bring much-needed oxygen back into the city if realised. In Bangkok, the Chulalongkorn University Centenary Park acts as an underground flood sponge for the sinking city. Another sponge concept in Bangkok was introduced with the new Benjakitti Park that just opened and hopes to reintroduce some biodiversity. Always keep your eyes open, above and below.
OPPORTUNITIES
3 October: Globus Call (grant)
🌐 Big bucks for art that is transformative, transglobal and transcends boundaries, even sectoral ones. Experimental work welcome. Just make sure you have a Nordic partner in your endeavour. A true geographic North-South cooperation, of sorts.
Ongoing: The Basics of the One Drop Foundation’s Social Art for Behaviour Change Approach (online course)
🎓 One Drop Foundation is unique in that they are a globally operating WASH NGO (WASH is the genius acronym for WAter, Sanitation, Hygiene, by the way) that works with art as a unique tool. They actually have deep ties to Cirque du Soleil. And now they are sharing this very social art for behaviour change approach with us in a free online course, available in French and English. Great illustration of one way to use art in sustainable development.
Please forward this newsletter to a friend, and do reach out: kai@edgeandstory.com