curious patterns #22

Dance your data, reimagine your projects, and write to your future ancestors.

Jan 04, 2023

curious patterns is an email newsletter on all things culture, impact and sustainable development, written by Kai Brennert from edge and story (LinkedIn).

I know, I know, it’s been a hot minute since you last heard from me. I did some client visits, discussed big topics at the Global Cultural Relations Platform Reunion 🇪🇺, moderated a panel at the Asia-Pacific Network for Cultural Education and Research Conference 🇸🇬, and gave guest lectures at Humak 🇫🇮 and Heilbronn 🇩🇪 Universities of Applied Sciences. Some of it online, of course. And now it’s already 2023. Bonkers. Happy new year!

I also want to thank all of you new subscribers for your trust in me to not make your inbox explode. Welcome, folks at Andani Africa 🇿🇦, GIZ 🇩🇪, Wildlife Trusts 🇬🇧, Helvetas 🇨🇭, B+A 🇺🇸, IMF 🇺🇸, Pigeon Bridge 🇱🇻, Tutti Matti per Colorno 🇮🇹, Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data 🌐, Claudia Porto Consulting 🇧🇷, Else Christensen-Redzepovic Cultural Relations 🇩🇰, Goethe-Institut 🇧🇪, Goldsmiths 🇬🇧, Salzburg Global Seminar 🇦🇹, Lakhon Komnit Organization 🇰🇭, Bobi Robson Digital 🇬🇧, Artistik License 🇮🇳, Open Society Foundations 🇺🇸, Japan Foundation 🇺🇸, BOP Consulting 🇬🇧, LASALLE College of the Arts 🇸🇬, Lagi-Maama Academy and Consultancy 🇳🇿, South African Cultural Observatory 🇿🇦, and many others from across 🇲🇽🇨🇦🇯🇵🇩🇪🇦🇪🇹🇷🇳🇱🇿🇦🇬🇧🇪🇸🇧🇸🇺🇬🇦🇺🇸🇦🇸🇬🇫🇮. Wow!

🇪🇺 Let’s start with a bang, shall we? The EU Commission wrote a report on its activities and plans around the cultural dimension of sustainable development. This is what they suggest for their own future engagement:

Combining culture-led innovation with sustainability-driven investments and adaptive responses to breakthrough transformations of society in times of crisis should be at the heart of new policy frameworks for rethinking cultural policymaking in more strategic, coherent and effective ways.

📦 Have you heard of the African Continental Free Trade Area yet? It’s big. Literally and figuratively. Think cultural tourism, local content, intellectual property protection.

🇦🇫 Interesting development dilemma: continue to support cultural projects or take a stance against the Taliban? Since this article, though, shit has gotten much worse.

🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia is investing in augmented reality for music education. In fact, they’re building a whole virtual music academy. Will that create more access for women, too?

🇬🇭 A rebuff to the Enlightenment, deconstructing the idea of a museum, philosophy and ecology alongside art – does that resonate with you? Yeah, with me, too.

🤖 Prediction ideology is the operating system of the Global North. AI art is soft propaganda for the ideology of prediction. [insert mic drop by author here]

🏺 You know in which field Asia is currently world leading? Being the victim of illicit trafficking of cultural heritage. Stuff is messed up. UNESCO has thoughts.

👕 The Overseas Development Institute has discovered arts and culture. And design. Fashion design to be precise. Policy is the missing link, apparently. Well, yes.

🌍 culture Solutions thinks that EU-Africa cultural relations need programming beyond fashion. Also, the EU should abolish its deficit lens when talking development.

🎧 Okay, here’s what you gotta do: develop a national music strategy, then set up an ETF to track your high performers, and finally watch the industry grow. Too easy.

⚽️ Now that the World Cup is over, let’s talk about football. The sport and its ecosystem hold a range of opportunities for CCIs in Africa beyond any mega-event.

🇫🇷 Nothing mindblowing here, but a nice little overview of culture and development engagement by AFD, the Agence Française de Développement. EUR 241m since 2017.

🇯🇵 Everyone talks about Bilbao, but have you ever heard of Naoshima and Teshima in the Seto Inland Sea? I had the honour for almost two years to share an office with the visionary behind this rural regenerative placemaking project combining environmental and social action with top-notch contemporary arts. Long-term vision in action.

🏷 Show me the artist-run hotels

Do you know these design thinking card games that make you draw two cards with random things/ideas/scenarios, and your job is it to come up with an original thought on how they fit together and solve a problem? Well, something similar happened to me. Card one was having recently been selected as Young Expert for Fair Culture by the German Commission for UNESCO and hearing about initial ideas for a fair culture label. Card two was reflecting on my own travel habits as work travel has started to pick up again.

There is certainly something to be said about the necessity of business trips and how we can reduce them in the first place, but I wanted to reflect a little on how we travel. A large chunk of my business expenses are actually transport and hotel costs. I must admit that I have also been a bit of a point-chaser, ultimately benefitting large hotel chains. And while consciously choosing one airline over another doesn’t really make much sense for anything but convenience and price (and perhaps how they treat their employees), your choice of accommodation does matter.

I realised that I want to travel more consciously, and ideally support arts and culture in the process, like staying at an artist-run or artist-focused hotel. However, finding accommodation that explicitly and strategically supports the cultural and creative industries isn’t as easy as I thought it would be, especially in places I am not familiar with. Inspired by the Fairtrade label, then, I was wondering whether we could have something along these lines for the hospitality industry with a specific focus on arts and culture.

Starting small, how about a multi-tier label or identifier for hotels and other hospitality businesses?

Tier one: an artist-run space that very explicitly provides one or more artists’ livelihoods, and ideally integrates art in the guest experience.
Tier two: an artist-adjacent space that has an in-house gallery or a performance programme, possibly even studio space that can be accessed by the local arts community.
Tier three: an artist-supportive space that collaborated with local artists in its design and development, or regularly supports arts activities through its CSR.

Rather than having a central and paid entity for coordination, this could for example be handled through a smart contract on a blockchain, with a community-run interface for people to explore, discover and book. Smart contracts would automatically issue the label if entities can prove that they are adhering to the rules set out by the creative community. Of course, all of this can also happen in web 2.0 without the decentralised approach, but I think it would add a nice touch of honesty and community.

Alright, enough half-baked ideas for these first few days of the new year.

IMPACT

🎙 Evaluation podcasts are pretty nerdy, but they deliver. Massive shout-out to Gladys Rowe for her new Indigenous Insights: An Evaluation Podcast. It’s rich, it’s honest, it’s eye-opening. I’m a few episodes in and each conversation really feels like a gift. For everyone working with evaluation and especially those in the wider culture space, I am sure you will find a lot that resonates (and hopefully also a few things that unsettle). Thank you, Gladys, and all the power to you in your work towards decolonial futures and strengthening Indigenous resurgence.

🎭 From math-thinking to data theatre. Literally. The folks over at Northeastern wanted to embody information. Not just using embodied information as data, but embodying responses to data. So they came up with data theatre and data dancing. I like how one of their participants said they were translating your math mind into a creative mind, into a story mind, into a people mind. And I can relate. When working with numerical data (or even aggregated qualitative data), it’s easy to lose the actual story. All blogs have fascinating nuggets of reflection and background info. Perhaps start with this one, and then read your way through their website.

ART IN BETWEEN

🐠 So this is what it feel like fi dead. I have already proclaimed in previous issues of curious patterns that I love short stories and climate fiction. The Metamorphosis of Marie Martin hits all the spots for me. It’s a poetic parable that touches on issues of regeneration and power, on loss and aspiration, on transcendence and healing.

If you like this story by Nadine Tomlinson, I urge you to also check out the other brilliant and beautifully illustrated stories of the Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors project.

RESEARCH | REPORTS | TOOLKITS

🛑 Projects are not the future. They can’t be, they shouldn’t be. This is a conversation I had with many people over the past couple of months. That’s why I was super excited when I was recommended this essay by Bojana Kunst. (h/t Veronka)

And how is it that in this kind of production, even if it is full of experiments, projects somehow destroy the time for political alliances and complex social processes, and erase durations of alliances?

This excellent essay looks at projects from both its capitalist and experimental-collaborative perspectives before introducing us to the concept of temporal kinships. The discussion centres questions of sustainability and looks at performance as a process and field of social and political deliberation. I can’t do the essay justice with my mini summary here, so please please please go have a read yourself. I believe that we urgently need this reframing, but it requires a major cognitive shift.

This IETM publication on wicked problems also features two other essays. Katja Praznik issues a call to action for collective organising of artists, which nicely sits on a Marxist reading of arts managers controlling the means of production and exploiting artists, and how freelancing is a capitalist trap. And Hans Abbing shares with us an overview of the current state of artistic careers and a perhaps rather sobering prediction for the future of artistic work.

We want to serve you better!

Some curious minds and I are cooking up plans to serve the sector better with relevant industry knowledge. For that, we need to know what and how you like your content. Hot and fast with a ☕️ cup of coffee? Slow and chill with a 🍷 glass of wine?

LIMINAL SPACE

🎭 We clearly don’t know enough about China. At the ANCER conference in Singapore last month, one theatre scholar posed the question whether jubensha (剧本杀) should become part of the theatre pedagogy canon. Until then, I was blissfully unaware of this very recent but incredibly popular cultural phenomenon. Mind you, we’re talking more than 30,000 venues in China alone. So, down the rabbit hole I went to learn more about this scripted, interactive, and sometimes even boozy murder mystery-meets-LARP invention that rose to fame as the third-most popular offline activity for Chinese youth. Here’s a great intro to jubensha, enhanced with some sociological reflections by the authors.

🤖 Is there a way out of poverty porn? If you’re not working in the humanitarian field, you might be unfamiliar with the term, but I am very sure you know what I am talking about. UNICEF television ads with malnourished African children urging you to donate, anyone? Yes, all kinds of wrong but sadly still a powerful way to mobilise white saviour money. Now, this charity is using AI to generate images that capture the desolation and isolation without requiring our clients to compromise their dignity. I still see some pretty big ethical concerns, but the thought is indeed an interesting one, don’t you think?

🍳 Afro-fusion cuisine? Yes, please! NatGeo did a neat little profile of chef Dieuveil Malonga, who is shaking up the Rwandan and the wider African finer dining scene for that matter. Originally from Congo, trained in Germany, and inspired by his food travels to 48 African countries, chef Malonga also champions culinary tourism, gastronomy training, and sustainable agriculture. What’s not to love?

🎧 Here’s my little 2022 playlist with new releases from all over the globe … just in case you needed some 6 hours of good music.

OPPORTUNITIES

🏛 16 January: Museum International: Museums, sustainability and sustainable development (call for papers)

🎓 Ongoing: Culture and Climate Resilient Development (online course)

Please forward this newsletter to a friend, and do reach out: kai@edgeandstory.com