curious patterns #25
Why we need creative industries policy imaginaries, why we compare cities' cultural vibrancy, and why documentary theatre rocks.
curious patterns is an online publication of curated news around arts and culture, impact and evaluation, sustainable development and regenerative futures, and where these all intersect. My name is Kai Brennert, I am based out of Cambodia 🇰🇭, and I run my own consultancy edge and story.
Fantastic to see new subscribers from the University of Sydney 🇦🇺, CGIAR 🇫🇷, Kodluyoruz 🇹🇷, A. Rich Culture 🇧🇸, Strategic Design Scenarios 🇧🇪, UWC Atlantic 🇬🇧, ERRIN European Regions and Innovation Network 🇧🇪, La Réplique 🇫🇷, The Active Wellbeing Society 🇬🇧, Sound Diplomacy 🇬🇧, and Helvetas 🇨🇭 - pleasure to have you with us on this journey!
🇨🇳 When China does cultural heritage protection, the belts and roads are rarely far. Now they’re spearheading a new Asian cultural heritage alliance. Development?
📱 When AI meets TikTok, history is being rewritten. Well, reimagined. How about a little decolonial curiosity and a deep dive into Somalia conquering Europe?
⚖️ Africa now has its own artistic freedom network. And that network now has a website. And that website now has a bunch of cool artistic freedom country reports.
⛑️ As we’re on it, UNESCO published your one-stop-shop for all news on artistic freedom. The report also ponders whether a SDG target for artists’ safety would help.
📊 If you’re anything like me, you’ll happily get lost in this EU culture statistics publication and its many charts. UI sucks, but the tweet recommendations are cute.
🕸️ Hello multi-sectoral networks and bye established institutions. I like how this rapid foresighting exercise for the creative industries played with the Three Horizons model.
🪄 i’m sorry did you say street magic? I have no idea if this game is any good, but the name and the concept (guerilla public transport powered by street art) are dope af.
🚀 Radical Ocean Futures use imagination alongside science and emotion to address deep uncertainty. Models and stories become science fiction prototyping.
💸 How many of your gray hairs are a result of restricted funding from philanthropists who don’t trust artists? Yeah, same. Here are some trust-based philanthropy pointers.
📐 The planet might be our biggest client and architecture should increasingly become activism. Vibing here with interviewee and RIBA gold medalist Yasmeen Lari.
🇨🇴 Writing a music history through the lens of narco-terrorism is quite the approach. Go get your non-powdered fix of sonic exploration of Colombia in the 90s now.
🇺🇸 You have probably heard it already but the US of A have just announced the Global Responsibility reunion tour, starting with a major gig in Paris, if you know what I mean.
🔮 Field Notes on Imagining Creative Industries Futures
Over the past few months, I have been working with the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts here in Cambodia. The government is planning to set up a Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries. I came in to help coordinate sector input, do some regional benchmarking, and generally inform the mission and setup up of such an agency. Super exciting stuff! Not least because I was given a lot of freedom in how to engage and collect all the views from the priority sectors (provisionally, these are visual arts, sculpture, weaving, music, performing arts, film, and culinary arts – in case anybody was interested).
Previous civil society consultations that I observed often felt more like a game of offense and defense rather than dialogue. So my instinct was to experiment with the format a little. And since we are talking to artists and cultural workers, why not use something they are arguably best at: imagining alternatives. More specifically, imagining ideal futures for their work, their sectors, their country. With this in mind, I went looking for resources and found this very recent UNDP Inclusive Imaginaries Toolkit, which I borrowed from liberally and really enjoyed applying.
In the same way as how social design and innovation practices often focus on existing problems and current user needs rather than desires or dreams, policy design and development programmes many a times tend to reproduce the world as we know it, in all its faults and failures.
And off we imagined. Aside from all the rich thematic insights, I had a lot of process realisations that I would like to share with you – please indulge in my field notes:
🔮 It’s hard not to focus on today’s challenges and instead imagine an ideal future. Creating comfortability with utopian thinking and speculation is tougher than it sounds, even for artists who use their imagination muscle every day. And getting people in the zone takes time. Time that not everyone can afford to give.
🔑 Facilitation is key. If AI is going to take all other jobs from humans, this one is here to stay. And it’s definitely an area I need and want to get better at. Seriously, guiding conversations, holding space, stimulating ideation, opening worlds, and mediating are so incredibly important when working with people in all their beautiful depth and diversity.
📣 Address the ecosystem. We wanted to get deep insights from a range of different industry players – think festivals, directors, artists, educators, students, technicians, presenters, suppliers – to make the collective imagination as diverse as possible. The benefit of that really became obvious when one of the seven groups (for logistical reasons mostly) turned out to be pretty homogenous.
🏀 But not everyone is an ecosystem player. This one really surprised me. I was expecting people in the industry to have a similar value perspective toward collaboration and knowledge sharing. Turns out, that’s not always the case. Absolutely my bad for assuming this and not being prepared to deal with egos and power structures. Interestingly, it was often those with a good deal of financial stability and established connections that didn’t see the need to engage with the wider ecosystem.
🛋️ Be a safe space. To be honest, we were not putting in place a lot of measures to actively be a safe space for participants. But the stark contrast to how they usually face backlash when speaking frankly about what is important to them opened our sessions up. Several participants shared vulnerabilities that they would usually hide in a traditional policy consultation. Lesson learnt.
🎨 Visualise! Your dreams written down is nice. Your dreams visually represented by somebody else is fire. I had to do some convincing but finally got approval to have an illustrator on-site for all sessions to listen to the conversations and then create visuals of collective possible futures for each sector. Positioning the illustrator as another data analyst alongside us was game-changing. The outputs will help to make your imaginaries tangible.
✋ People are hungry for participation. Participatory policymaking is something pretty new in the Cambodian cultural policy context. Seeing how most people were really interested in what is going to happen to their input shows how hungry everyone is to be heard and play a role. We shared drafts with everyone for additional input to make sure we process everything the way it was intended. It’s a great opportunity to build more trust and normalise feedback loops.
😅 The hard work is yet to come. The politics mainly. Departmental alignments, inter-ministerial discussions, budget allocation, the whole shebang. But that’s someone else’s job…
I am so very keen to continue exploring cultural policy imaginaries and how we can design policy processes that encompass participatory governance, artist placements, futures methodology, and creative imagination for better, more inclusive futures. Hit me up if you have any ideas or projects in mind, too.
IMPACT
🌆 Creativity benchmarking for cities is all the rage these days. OG creative economy consultancy BOP just launched BOP500, a platform to access cultural infrastructure and attractiveness data on 500 cities across the globe. I just signed up for a call with an expert about Phnom Penh – colour me intrigued. The fact that the drop-down menu said Phnom Penh, Kandal isn’t promising, though, because Phnom Penh is its own province and not part of Kandal province. I am going in open-minded and I shall report back. Let’s not forget CcHub’s Creative Vibrancy Index for Africa, though. They are attempting something similar for 12 cities on the African continent. The categories are a mix of direct CCI and enabling indicators (governance, infrastructure, mobile penetration etc.), amalgamating that into creative vibrancy. The numbers make a whole lot more sense once you have found the paper explaining the methodology, which took me a hot minute.
🇭🇰 Turns out, Hong Kong might also be partial to cultural vibrancy monitoring. Well, they would if they implemented the conceptual framework Yu Kwok-Lit developed after studying various other frameworks and cherrypicked what works for Hong Kong. The result is taking a rather broad approach to culture, as illustrated in the four central dimensions: belief and value, everyday lifestyle, arts and creation, and memories and tradition. I like these dimensions as they allow for a very liberal engagement with the concept of culture and accounts for interdependencies. Upon seeing the proposed indicators, I’m a tad bit more hesitant, though, as they are very heavily based on built infrastructure. For me, cultural vibrancy is probably what happens in the cracks. Anyhow, check out the article and the wider issue of this new Taiwanese journal: Glocal Approaches to Culture and Sustainability: Measuring the Values and Impacts of Culture.
🙏 A humble request: If you enjoy this newsletter and you want to do me a solid, please share this issue on your socials, forward it to your colleagues, mention it in brainstorming meetings, scream about from your balcony, or scribble it on toilet stalls.
ART IN BETWEEN
🇲🇾 Documentary theatre is the best theatre genre you have never heard of. Or maybe it was just me living under a rock, I don’t know. A few months ago (I know, this newsletter issue has been a long time coming), I went to the Bangkok International Performing Arts Meeting BIPAM, where I got to see two shows: I saw I Say Mingalaba, You Say Goodbye by B-Floor Theatre, a Thai-Burmese production, which was great in its multi-language humour and stage chaos. And then I was absolutely blown away by Five Arts Centre production A Notional History – documentary theatre about Malaysia’s erasure of its communist struggle in public history and the one-sidedness of history textbooks and school curricula, all through the lens of journalistic enquiry, song, political cartoon, and live textbook dissection. Read more about the piece here, including reviews that are way more eloquent than my sorry attempt to convince you that A Notional History is an awesome piece of theatre.
RESEARCH | REPORTS | TOOLKITS
🌱 The EU wants culture to go green. And the Creative Europe programme shall be their vessel. Good on them! Consultancy Ecorys put together a big report looking at what’s currently happening in that area, consolidates a bunch of hands-on recommendations for cultural actors, and proposes some changes on the monitoring side going forward. I skimmed through the report so you don’t have to. Here are a couple of points that stood out for me:
A little too narrowly focused on carbon emissions, which I think is a missed opportunity to consider the many inter-related dimensions of environmental collapse. The doughnut suggests ocean acidification, land conversion, freshwater withdrawals, and biodiversity loss, for example.
Everybody wants to be more green but neither the funder (i.e. DG EAC) nor the grantees seem to have the necessary capacity to implement such strategies, meaning both knowledge and time. That’s an issue. But also, money doesn’t solve all problems (and neither does technology, by the way).
Sustainable computing is on the top of the list of strategies that need to be learnt more about for effective implementation. This is an important finding and I am sure service providers will be keen to jump at this opportunity.
There’s A LOT more information on these 160-odd pages (I did not sift through the annexes, sorry), so if this tickles your fancy, please do have a look.
🇹🇭 4D printing, NFT money laundering, and biodegradable craft materials. Welcome to Thailand’s 10-year creative industries foresight report! The country’s Creative Economy Agency used four archetype scenarios for their analysis: cultural value added, sustainability rebalanced, technological blending for every scale, and prosperity downturn; referring to continuation, new equilibrium, transformation, and collapse scenarios respectively. And despite the fact that I had absolutely no clue what 4D printing was until I googled it after reading the report, I love that it gives stakeholders in politics and industry these super tangible elements to better convey what creative industries futures might lie ahead. But they don’t stop there – you’ll also find interesting policy recommendations like setting up a creative industries sandbox, promoting green financing options, and a managing a cultural supply chain database.
WHAT ELSE?
🌊 When knowledges are plural, how do we relate? Recognising multiple ways of knowing is a serious act of unlearning. You need to chuck out pre-conceptions of what is valid knowledge and acceptable ways of communicating said knowledge. A real listening game that is more than audible. And a collaborator of mine, brilliant Nepalese illustrator Promina Shrestha, shared this excellent resource she worked on that introduces us to the concept of plural and political knowledges. This illustrated book examines the different ways of knowing and communication about the Kirulapana Canal in Colombo, Sri Lanka. You will be surprised about the vast variety of relations people have with this canal, crocodiles included. So, listen up, fellow evaluators, because this skill applies to us even more than to everyone else.
🍜 The gastropoetics of Afro-Asia after the plantation. I mean, how could you not be immediately hooked?! Food is slowly but steadily shuffling its way into the cultural and creative industries, and also my focus. Whether that’s through conversations with a colleague consulting on national slow food strategies (hi Bernhard 👋), culinary diplomacy programmes of the U.S. Department of State I got to evaluate, or seeing the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts elect culinary arts as one of their CCI priority sectors – food is everywhere. And I’m not mad about it at all. Naturally, I was super happy when I stumbled upon Kitchen Marronage by Tao Leigh Goffe, which is described as a new test kitchen for culinary collusion, gastronomy, food histories, and experimentation. Check it out, get lost, indulge! Probably one of the most exciting formats blending art, academia, and community these days.
📈 We have seen fractional investing in artwork before. What we haven’t seen is a platform dedicated to African art (and a mission to nurture the sector). What I haven’t seen before, either, is fractionally owning songs so you could potentially earn micro-royalties instead of just cashing out on the secondary market for visual art. Now, Artsplit seems really exciting in theory and the website looks pretty nice, but I can’t really see any art on it yet that you could potentially invest in. Also, no idea how legit. But A for effort and let’s watch this space.
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