curious patterns #28
On the connection of cultural heritage and sovereignty, the possibilities of regenerative evaluation, and the potential of creative data observatories.
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 the evaluation, research and policy consultancy edge and story.
Hello and welcome new subscribers at SOAS 🇬🇧, Oxford University 🇬🇧, Oyoun 🇩🇪, RMIT University 🇦🇺, Burgundy School of Business 🇫🇷, Onarım Atölyesi 🇹🇷, British Council 🇮🇳, u-institut 🇩🇪, City of Albuquerque 🇺🇸, American University 🇺🇸, SCALE-LeSAUT 🇨🇦, the New Hampshire Department of Natural and Cultural Resources 🇺🇸, Heinz Endowments 🇺🇸, Metamorphosis 🇧🇪, Kulturdirektoratet Arts and Culture Norway 🇳🇴, and UNESCO.
I am currently wrapping up a couple of projects, the fruits of which I’ll hopefully be able to share soon. No idea where the year has gone, though – felt like an absolute whirlwind. The good thing is: I have some availability from January (and even more from April) onward. If you’re interested in collaborating with edge and story for a programme evaluation, an exploratory research, a deep-dive data story, futures and imagination-based strategising, or some policy innovation moonshots, I’m happy to schedule a virtual coffee ☕️ to explore if I’d be of any help to your current plans and challenges. Plus, I love to meet new people and have a good conversation about the trials and tribulations of our sectors.
📣 And a quick teaser: In 2024, I am planning to bring in more artists as co-evaluators, co-researchers, and co-facilitators. More soon!
🇹🇭 Muay Thai soft power – I like! Claiming no other sport carries its origin in its name – I don’t. Bro should really know about Muay Lao, Kun Khmer, and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
📽️ I know film is a big numbers game. One billion dollars still sounds absolutely unfathomable to me. That’s Afreximbank’s new investment in their African Film Fund.
🖼️ It’s COP o’clock again and posters certainly won’t change the world. But perhaps, maybe they can open our eyes just a little more. This exhibition looks at their power.
🇪🇹🤝🇰🇭 World Heritage gone wrong! Both Ethiopia and Cambodia have recently come under fire for evicting people from heritage sites, citing the very UNESCO designation.
💰 So, the official IFC YouTube hosts a videocast of its director interviewing artists. Might that be a foreshadowing of IFC’s big investment plans in the creative industries?
💸 Who’s down for a little anarchy in grantmaking? I mean, can you say no to community governance, embodied knowledge, and decentralised capital?
🇹🇻 Not exactly arts and culture, but WTF? Australia is granting Tuvaluans the right to resettle in exchange for a veto on their security policy. All due to climate change. Meanwhile, Tuvalu challenges the legal concept of sovereignty by creating the first digital nation, inclusive of public services and a cultural repository. Brave creativity in the face of extreme adversity. How you like that, Straya?
🇫🇯 700 miles south in Fiji, it’s not looking much better. Equally impressive and sad that the Ministry of Disaster Management has to get involved in intangible cultural heritage.
🤖 Lots of things to be afraid of when it comes to AI – reproducing stereotypes is certainly one. Makes you wonder what a pro-cultural diversity AI might look like.
🇮🇱🇵🇸 And here goes your second WTF moment of the day: an AI-powered virtual simulation of the Israel-Palestine conflict for the UN. What could possibly go wrong?!
🌍 The East African Community might soon have a Creative and Cultural Industries Development Council. Keen to see how Somalia’s new membership plays into that.
🌱 Could there be a regenerative turn in evaluation?
Sustainability really isn’t enough anymore, regeneration is where it’s at if you’d ask the GP of Planet Earth. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here you go. Applying regenerative thinking and principles must start somewhere. So, when earlier this year fellow cultural manager and systems thinker Shireen Marican and I started thinking about what regenerative principles for arts management might look like, naturally a lot of questions about our own practices came up.
So, let me provoke here for a second: what if we had our objectives all wrong? What if we used the wrong evaluation questions, the wrong approaches to data collection? Here’s just a few questions that I wish had asked in evaluations but might actually ask in the future:
➔ How much knowledge / learning are you contributing to society?
➔ In what non-monetary ways do you engage with your community?
➔ What changes have you made in your or someone else’s life that were inspired by your creative practice?
➔ What cultural knowledge and traditions do you apply to maintain or regenerate a balance between human life and nature?
➔ What do you consider enough impact?
➔ Did you harm anyone or anything in the process?
➔ How are you engaging with or changing the harmful systems around you?
➔ Could your creative practice be temporary, modular or circular?
➔ Could you take away something from your work to increase your impact?
IMPACT
🛝 Wanna be the Barney Stinson of evaluation? Well, here’s your impact playbook, courtesy of Europeana. Lucky you this one is not full of scams to get into somebody’s pants. Instead, you will find a step-by-step guide from impact design all the way to evaluation. There are so many excellent parts in this playbook: an explanation of the accountability of outcomes, hands-on indicator development, data collection method examples for different intensities and depths, tools and worksheets like the empathy map, and so much more. It certainly is a deep-dive and potentially appears a bit overwhelming for impact and evaluation newbies, but it’s actually super user-friendly and if you follow the steps, even novices should be really well set-up. This is easily one of the most comprehensive culture x evaluation resources out there!
🎨 The magic is in the process, the context, the meaning. If working with arts-based methods in evaluation, you should never analyse the art produced as a unit in an evaluation – only use it to elicit a qualitative debrief. I love how Jennica and Maya from And Implementation break down what arts-based evaluation is and, more importantly, is not in this arts-based evaluation methods 101. And in the process of doing that, they’re also nicely challenging some of the Western-centric ways of defining evaluation. Also this:
Throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks is not a methodology.
🎸 Corporate storytelling meets crowd-sourcing. Fry Creative is entering the cultural evaluation consulting world in a very charming way – welcome, friends! So, I’ll leave it to them to shout out their request: “If you have thoughts about the role a Data Observatory could or should play, in better maximising the impact, learning and direction of mega events in the UK, then please be in touch.” And I’ll be looking out for that crowd-sourced data observatory and see what we can learn for non-UK.
🍷 As we are talking about data observatories, this EU-wide platform by CICERONE takes a rather unusual perspective of centring production networks. It’s mostly based on interview data and coded down to some very interesting dimensions. You will find insights regarding actors in the production (I just looked at one about a dance performance and another one about a traditional wine, dialect and music culture – so that term is used pretty elastically), where they are from, how they are organised, what production roles they take, and how they interact with each other. The objective is to de-silofy the cultural and creative sector, but I must admit that I find the policy use case still a tad bit niche. Perhaps the more data, the clearer the subsequent policy imperatives?
RESEARCH | REPORTS | TOOLKITS
🌍 Gotta seize the opportunity when development money and culture flirt. In October, Morocco hosted a big World Bank and IMF gathering. Creative industries were discussed, too. This report by UM6P and K&Co is collating a bunch of insights how to unleash the potential of African CCIs and, I assume, served as a discussion paper of sorts. Lots of big numbers, many well-known sector truths, but incredibly important if it finds the right ears and eyes (WB & IMF folks perhaps 😉). I find the strong undertones of pan-African collaboration and mobility in the report very intriguing. Probably also because of the massive barriers that still exist, or as interviewee Hicham Daoudi puts it:
I've had to move artworks between Morocco, Rwanda and Uganda. It happens to be three times more expensive than sending an artwork to Miami.
🇿🇦 Special Cultural Economic Zones could help coherent support for CCIs. MSc Finance graduate Mosa Mokuena shares in her thesis how some economic policy instruments might be a solution to insufficient and fragmented support of cultural and creative industries in South Africa. Side note: we should absolutely look at Master’s theses more often before such important research simply disappears with the graduation of a student.
💰 How to make sure nobody wants to read your report? Make it 438 pages long and feature a truckload of full-page ads. Ugh. On the bright side, Deloitte does have some interesting insights regarding the arts and finance nexus in its latest stocktaking. 83% of younger collectors said that investment returns were a key motivation – that’s a massive increase from previous years and almost twice as high compared to older art collectors. Only 24% of collectors use special collection software (Excel and good ol’ paper are still king for many). Fractional ownership of art is on the rise. Only a third of family offices are interested in cultural impact investment, despite growing interest in social impact investing among younger folks. And I didn’t know that art-secured lending is even a thing – interesting.
ART IN BETWEEN
🎧 It’s time for my annual Spotify playlist of awesome music released throughout the year – if you want it or not. I try to look in the far sonic corners of the globe for new releases and found some great tunes from 🇲🇬🇲🇾🇹🇼🇧🇷🇩🇴🇧🇼🇸🇳🇱🇸🇵🇰🇬🇪🇪🇨🇲🇳 and more. Genre irrelevant – yay for musical omnivorism!
WHAT ELSE?
🍦 The past is not a good guide to the future. My media diet recently has been feeding me lots of perspectives that us humans are currently in a fundamental shift of how we engage with the world around us. As fundamental as agrarian and industrial transitions perhaps. The Five Flavours of Betweenness is trying to make sense of these shifts and how things try to be born. Jonathan Rowson explores systems change, theory building, new ontologies, a broader concept of art, and metaphysical change. Yes, it’s heavy. Yes, it’s abstract. But I’m a box person and this helps me put things into boxes.
🛩️ Slow travel, sustainable travel, cultural travel. Or simply Trippin’. The concept is straightforward: a city travel guide curated by local artists and designers. See if you vibe with the musician, painter, or chef so you kind of have an idea of what you get, and then head over to the five or six faves that person picked out. Currently, there are 121 destinations in the database, and I am very keen to try out this underground scene mapping exercise. Unfortunately, my next destinations Malé 🇲🇻 and Hanoi 🇻🇳 are not on there yet. Where are my local artist guides at?
🛍️ If it was designed, it can also be re-designed. Plastic, off you go. PlasticFree is a bit of a different animal when it comes to online platforms: it’s part showcase, part sales, part repository, part collaboration, all focused on circular design solutions for a plastic-free future, bringing together creatives and corporates. I find this platform very intriguing (and could imagine something similar for the arts sector, though perhaps without a plastic focus), but ultimately I can’t speak to how good it really is because, well, I don’t have an immediate use case for it and I’m not willing to shell out the subscription fee. TOPIA wrote a nice introduction to the platform.
…. and as I am writing this, I am thinking of all the tech product review YouTubers out there. You know, all that ASMR unboxing and high-level nitpicking in front of purple LED strips. Now, where are the folks that (professionally) review these kinds of products relevant for us in the cultural and creative industries? If you know anyone who does this, please let me know 📨
Please forward this newsletter to a friend, and do reach out: kai@edgeandstory.com