curious patterns #3
This month: mandatory cultural impact assessments, perverse indicators, nerdy data visualisations and propaganda biennales.
It’s been a crazy month with far too many tabs open, both in my browser and mentally. I’m sure you can relate. For me, thoughts of the future occupied my mind for the better part of the month, and how I as an individual can do my best to make the future a liveable and lovable one. You might see some of that anxiety reflected in this issue.
Welcome, all you new wonderful subscribers from Sangam Arts, Global Grand Central, Cambodian Living Arts, American Voices and Chive Charities - so glad to have you here 🥰
And if you were lucky and curious patterns was forwarded to you, you can subscribe right here right now:
Culture at the 🖤 of policy
In a recent podcast by ifa (sorry, German only) that discussed Germany's foreign cultural policy, literary scholar Sigrid Weigel called for mandatory cultural impact assessments during the drafting processes of all foreign policy interventions, including diplomacy, international trade, development cooperation as well as science and educational cooperation.
A comment South African playwright and cultural policy activist Mike van Graan made at the 2016 IFACCA Summit came to mind: Why wouldn't the EU invite stakeholders from the Global South to their policy consultations to avoid neo-colonial impacts - the EU’s policy implications reach far beyond their own countries. Do we have a don't-know, don't-care or don't-want situation here?
Very often, we, the culture sector, look at various policy areas and ask: what can you do for us? This is important, no question, but to really tackle issues of a systemic nature, we, must go beyond narrow issue advocacy and address the impact of all and every policy on arts and culture and vice versa, especially in/on the Global South: what are you doing to us? or even, what are we doing to ourselves?
I am guilty of isolating my attention to very specific policy silos myself - in this case, culture in development, aid and international trade policy. Seeing that these policy fields are embedded in and its policies constantly shift in relation to domestic political and technocratic decisions in other areas, looking purely at these narrow aisles of concern will not get us very far.
I support the idea of mandatory cultural impact assessments in public policy at all levels. Imagine a dedicated cultural impact team at each ministry or a cross-ministerial taskforce that is called to offer forecasts, data and recommendations for each new policy initiative, just like it is done for economic, social and environmental impact assessments.
There are already calls to consider culture in all UN decision making for the future and some European cultural actors also advocate to mainstream culture across all policy fields. A systemic literature review on cultural impact assessments from 2015, however, found little evidence of the practice actually established.
And I reckon, if we can't institutionalise cultural impact assessments at every stage and in every domain of policy making, let's be the cultural impact assessment. If we have the access, the power or the voice, we should insert ourselves into the policy making process. We need to ask questions, bring in a variety of views, and potentially make people uncomfortable. Of course, we need tools, data, frameworks and indicators, but that's what community is for. Let's just make sure these concepts are sufficiently flexible and don't fall into the ambiguity trap as described by Nevache and Stanziola (see below).
📰 What’s new
🇬🇭 Ghana wants to go radical with its museum and heritage sites. New governance structure, finances, education, research and repatriation of objects.
🌏 Asia’s wealthy turn to faith-based giving. In Indonesia alone, zakat encompasses $16 billion annually with great potential for SDGs if invested well.
🇧🇧 How to stay competitive as an artist, you ask? The Barbados government clearly thinks that producing small replicas of artworks are the answer.
🌍 European cultural civil society and national culture institutes call on the EU to include cultural relations into development cooperation frameworks. Yeah!
🇯🇲 In downtown Kingston, creative hub Life Yard transforms the neighbourhood through art, food, urban farming and income opportunities for local youth.
🇬🇧 Cultural evaluation should be creative and irrational as well as data-driven and strategic. That’s it. That’s the reflection of the Centre for Cultural Value.
🇹🇭 Is it subversive to rally against police brutality but not pull your art from a propaganda Biennale? Apparently, it’s all performative or generic enough.
🌍 Want them numbers? Ribio Nzeza Bunketi Buse compiled early quantitative impact assessments of COVID-19 on CCIs from several African countries.
🔍 A Closer Look
The perversion of indicators in 🇵🇦
Symbolic Implementation of Cultural Participation Programmes: The Case of Panama’s 500-Year Fund
(2020: Claire Nevache, Javier Stanziola)
Culture and the SDGs are in as tense a relationship as culture is with pretty much any other area that aims to achieve social or economic policy outcomes. Claire Nevache and Javier Stanziola use the lens of cultural participation programmes funded through Panama’s 500-Year Fund to explore how the economic logic of development agents in cultural grantmaking can create perverse incentives. Sounds like a heavy read (it’s not that bad - I promise 😎) but it’s definitely worth your time if you are ready to question some of the rationales and practices behind multi-stakeholder grant programmes in culture and development. The article is a good mix of meta-analysis (process of setting up the fund) and evaluation of some funded projects (mostly in relation to the tensions within the funding logic).
Claire and Javier excellently sketch out how a public fund that for reasons of transparency was managed by UNDP (not UNESCO, mind you) on behalf of the Panamanian government struggles to retain relevance amongst the contest of objectives by the different agencies involved. Both funders and applicants try to negotiate their position on the spectrum between aesthetics, community participation, socio-economic development and neighbourhood promotion. Yet, the ambiguous objectives laid out, how they are expected to be delivered and evaluated in a traditional development logic created an atmosphere that had some projects chase compliance while others embraced the community aspect. I agree with the authors that logic models such as a theory of change can be a great to tool to shape thinking but must not be the sole framework on which success or failure are measured.
In fact, Claire and Javier present the case of one project that embraced one of the fund’s objectives and transferred project control to community members, who in order to serve their needs (which should be very much in the fund’s interest) changed the project approach significantly and wrapped up much later than expected. Despite the objectively great project outcomes, this created a significant clash with UNDP as the originally agreed boxes could not be ticked. The other extreme was found in one project pursuing agreed socio-economic indicators above all else, compromising even community wellbeing and relevance. I believe this is a case of monitoring and evaluation gone wrong, which screams for dynamic evaluation practices that have learning and not (just) compliance at its heart.
Please take some time to read this generous piece of analysis - there are many more layers to unpack. Kudos to Claire and Javier, both of whom were actively involved in the fund as design and evaluation consultants, to share these insights with us 🙏
📊 Impact
🌐 I feel that one of the bigger disappointments from having culture not included as a goal in the SDGs is the absence of systematically collected data by big-shot actors, and thus the absence of cultural aspects in most planning of big development programmes. The World Bank just released their 2020 SDG Atlas which features beautifully compiled visual essays for each Sustainable Development Goal. Browse through the goals as there is some truly fascinating data. Personally I found the amount and flows of remittances pretty mind-boggling. But again, no data for culture frankly sucks!
🤓 Nerd alert! You may or may not be familiar with different types of data. Well, there are quite a few and they are used in different instances (e.g. boolean for logical true/false statements or numeric data for most things numbers). Categorical data is one such type that relies on unique categories (think theatres: publicly funded, privately funded or hybrid PPP). Jonathan Dunne put together a history of categorical data visualisation, showcasing the diversity and good practices of such. His examples include Für Elise, Les Misérables and Friends if you needed persuasion.
🦄 Unicorns
The future is now … or something like that 🤔
In the introduction I mentioned that I have been a bit future-anxious these past weeks. So I went to look for futures studies research, futures of the culture sector and how creativity and design are utilised in researching, speculating and forecasting futures. While a lot of the stuff out there couldn’t really quench my thirst (or was downright esoteric 💩), I did stumble upon Futuring Peace by The Design Futures Initiative and UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs.
Futuring Peace is / was / (will be?) a sort of open hackathon for teams to design creative speculative pieces on conflict prevention, peace mediation, and peacebuilding. The five projects selected for exhibition really take you out of your current bubble - for better or for worse. The Afrikan Futures Catalyst created a toolkit to embed peace in African institutions of higher education, ||u|| Collective envisions the clothing and gadgets of a peace activist through time, while the In Peace, We Believe team built a card game to facilitate peace mediations (which obviously is the lo-fi version of the AI peace mediator Bertha, duh). Check it out - it’s absolutely fascinating. The initiative will also publish a series of articles on Medium addressing creative speculative futures of peace.
Teaching futures of cultures
And while we’re at the topic of futures: Lev Manovich, who recently published the book Cultural Analytics, announced that he currently teaches a course called How to Predict Culture in 2050?, the teaching notes of which can be accessed here. I haven’t really dug much into the notes but I love love love that he is making these publicly accessible. Read the opening of the course description:
Science fiction movies and novels, global economic organizations, NGOs, think tanks, and many others make predictions about the future. But these predictions seem to only concern social and economic aspects of human life - technology, space travel, the impact of climate change, countries' economies, population growth, and so on. We are never told what kind of culture we may have decades from now. Fashion, literature, cinema, literature, social media, visual art, theatre, performance, and all other cultural forms are absent from these predictions.
I wonder whether he takes into account more than hegemonic (pop) cultures and explores how potential global or local counter cultures might play out.
🔧 Toolbox
🎨 Free illustrations for free minds
Words are heavy. Especially when they are huddled together en masse on scores of pages. I love to use illustrations to lighten up a dense page in a report or highlight an important message in a presentation. Good thing free illustrations has got me covered. The website shares a wide variety of royalty-free packages by various illustrators. Packages range from diverse humans in all kinds of scenes and my favourite random scribbles to the more eccentric buttsss series. Most artists and collectives don’t even require you to mention them, but we all know it’s the right thing to do. The illustrations used in this newsletter, for example, are by Katerina Limpitsouni from unDraw.
🎤 Humans
An interview with Muti Etter-Phoya
Data scientist, storyteller, cultural heritage enthusiast and founder of Logos Open Culture, Muti Etter-Phoya (web | Twitter) from Malawi shares his fascination with interdisciplinary approaches and the beautiful world of music in this issue of curious patterns.
A fascinating concept you were introduced to recently?
Bantu.Lab investigate Gqom music culture through one of my loves, urbanism. I am a big fan of African pop music (well, some of it) so this layering presents an interesting approach for me.
An artist with an urgent message?
I would say John Lwanda, prominent Malawian social scientist whose opus on Music in Malawi I am publishing. It's a subject that needs to be told, and he has invested over 20 years in doing research for this.
A question worth asking?
Why are we not telling more of our stories? ...speaking as an African storyteller.
🚀 Opportunities
December 11-20: Bangsokol Virtual Arts & Healing Festival
Slightly biased as I have worked on the original production for multiple years during my stint at Cambodian Living Arts, but I must give a special shout-out to the Virtual Arts & Healing Festival around the large performing arts piece Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia, organised by CLA and ArtsEmerson. This multi-day online festival with screenings of the performance, presentation of new work and discussions around, you guessed it, arts and healing promises to be super interesting and important in a time that needs a whole lot of healing.
By December 13: Creative Commissions for COP26
The British Council is offering up to 20 grants of £50k max each for British-international collaborations on artworks and big ideas that address climate change through a digital-first approach, or more precisely offer innovative responses to climate change. Applicants must live in their respective country to be eligible - sorry, climate refugees. And while the project is supposed to demonstrate clear benefit to the overseas eligible country, the British partner in the collaboration is automatically the lead partner as per BC directive. Great initiative, British Council, but we know you can do better 🙂
Ongoing: Innovative Finance: Hacking Finance to change the world
Do you know your debt from your equity? And how do you communicate impact to investment firms? No worries, the University of Cape Town’s Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship is on it. This free online course runs a few times per year (the latest started on November 23, so jump in now) and is a great introduction for folks like us to think about how big money can make big things happen. Even without a distinct culture angle, I took away a lot from the course. If you want a sneak peak into the topic, check out this publication.
📻 Media
Awesome name - check! Brilliant data visualisation - check! Captivating stories - check! The Pudding is different. Their tagline is “The Pudding is a digital publication that explains ideas debated in culture through visual essays” and boy do they deliver. To give you an idea, look at the countries that Americans were mostly occupied with throughout the last century (based on news headlines), find out why K-Pop groups are so big or explore population densities in cities like Kinshasa, Bengaluru and Chongqing through interactive 3D models. If you are notoriously curious and have a knack for data visualisation, this is for you.
In the last issue of curious patterns I mentioned a new Moana Oceania storytelling podcast that would launch soon. Now, the first episode of Vosa is out - in a very digestible 30-minute snack format. Several multi-disciplinary storytellers from 🇫🇯 🇵🇬 🇸🇧 and 🇹🇴 talk about indigenous storytelling in media, the destructiveness of foreign narratives about your own people, finding courage to tell your own stories, and the need for indigenous knowledge to be widely communicated. For me, this talanoa just further establishes how storytellers (i.e. artists) need to be at the very heart of any reporting, and in fact storytelling, about a certain place and community, and that media outlets and international organisations alike need to concede parts of their agency. ✊
🐦 Meanwhile on Twitter
curious patterns is a monthly email newsletter on all things culture, impact and development, written by Kai T. Brennert (Twitter | edge & story).
Send a message, share your feedback or reach out with content recommendations for future newsletters - I’d love to hear from you: kai@edgeandstory.com