curious patterns #30

Culture and maldevelopment, arts and unsustainability, creative brain drains, and despair escapism.

Apr 30, 2024

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 edgeandstory.

This is a quick reminder that I accept fan emails from my subscribers. Like this one 👇 Superlatives optional.

Jokes aside, I am super grateful for all the positive feedback I receive, especially from people I haven’t previously met – thank you! Please say hi and let’s try to have a coffee should our journeys cross at some point. In the next few months, I’ll be in Bangkok, Yogyakarta, Karlsruhe, Berlin, and of course, Phnom Penh.

And a big welcome to new subscribers at the International Music Council 🇫🇷, Kulturpolitische Gesellschaft 🇩🇪, InsightPact 🇹🇭, Phare Studio 🇰🇭, Minor Act 🇰🇭, Melon Rouge 🇰🇭, SOAS 🇬🇧, Domestic Data Streamers 🇪🇸, and Sónar 🇪🇸

🇸🇬 Singapore just hacked economic spillovers and the reason is Taylor Swift. Financial incentives, regional monopoly, GDP boost of 0.2 points. It’s such a case study.

🎙 Here's an okayish podcast about arts and the development industry for you. Sharing it because we don't talk nearly enough about it within the development space.

🇦🇷 I haven’t read it, but if a book has cultura and maldesarrollo in its title, there must be something interesting here. Let’s embrace cultural policy maldevelopment!

🌏 And then there is unsustainability. I love how my friend Sharmilla really drew out the internal struggles of our sector from the conversations we had in Vietnam recently.

🇸🇳 Senegal also has thoughts on arts and f*cked up funding systems. Everyone who has ever worked in the South can probably attest to most observations in this article.

🇪🇬🇸🇦 Brain drain from the Egyptian cultural industry or strategic move by Saudi Arabia to level up its film game – whatever you call it, it’s a pretty fascinating move.

🌳 Okay, this is certified epic! Nature, as in anything and everything around you, is now collecting music royalties if officially credited. $$$ then used for conservation.

📑 Honestly, I would have never thought of Wikipedia as an arts marketing or audience development tool, but the argument is actually very compelling. Check it out!

🇵🇭 Creative economy’s 7.1% GDP contribution is quite the talking point, dear Philippines. But what the fluff is renting [and] trading of symbols and images?

🇰🇲🇷🇪🇲🇬🇲🇺🇸🇨 The Indian Ocean now has their own cultural opportunities platform. Certainly looks pretty and it’s managed from Réunion. Fingers crossed it survives.

🧠 This article has made the rounds, and for good reason. Distraction eats entertainment eats art. Dopamine hits. Addiction! DEPRESSION!!! Fun?

🧪 Ever wanted to mess with AI? There is a new tool that helps artists digitally alter their art so they poison the machine learning process. Power to the people!

🌱 HOPEFUL FUTURES

For the past few months, I have been mulling over the role of curiosity, creativity, and imagination in our public school curricula. Together with Darathtey Din, my very soon-to-be wife 🥳, we worked on documenting the learnings of a five-year pilot to introduce culture and arts education into the public school system in Cambodia(a project by Cambodian Living Arts, the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, and the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts). Caught between parents’ perceived irrelevance of culture education, the education system’s need to create assessment metrics, and the culture system’s desire to transmit a particular version of heritage, the project team emphasised again and again the importance of encouraging curiosity, nurturing creativity, and sparking imagination in the classroom. Once the document is released, you’ll know how that’s going. But the bigger question really is why these particular cultural techniques are so very important. The short answer is: hopeful futures! And here is a bunch of articles and projects that have kept my head spinning for a while now:

→ A little more conceptual

🖼️ Unframing the Future is a refreshing rant in

Creative Destruction

on why we need new visions for the future, rather than more of the same doom and gloom.

🔀 Polyfuturism — One World, Many Futures is a rallying cry for exactly what the title suggests: more diverse narratives of the future. Something I will explore more.

🌐 Protopia Futures [framework] is a particularly compelling futures narrative, a living manifesto that doesn’t just want better but actively hopeful futures.

→ A little more applied

🧰 Using the future is your 101 introductory guide to futures literacy and strategic foresight. They even ask whether futures can be taught in schools like history.

🏢 Ministry of Imagination shows what collective imagination can do if you just let people formulate their desirable policy futures. This publication has 600 ideas.

🪞 The Future Mirror helps you bring your lo-fi prototypes to life, re-imagined by AI. A great idea how to use AI for process and inspiration, not mere outputs.

My next quest: imagine more hopeful cultural policy futures!

IMPACT

♾️ Is evaluation just fun and games? Last year, I had a conversation with a fellow evaluator in the cultural space what it really means to centre learning in our work. I remember there was beer and wine and live music … but no satisfactory conclusions. It’s easy to uphold organisational learning as an aspirational goal in our practice but in reality it’s rather hard to design the right processes. This article by Fodé Beaudet takes a step back and plays with the idea of MEL (monitoring, evaluation and learning) as infinite games. Perhaps it’s not about designing processes but listening closely for processes to emerge. I hope this teaser is abstract enough for you to be intrigued.

🎭 Your MEL framework just got Boal’ed! I love me a good crossover episode. Philea, a European philanthropy network, experimented with Forum Theater as a means to unearth and address power imbalances in monitoring and evaluation. The observations are good but still sound a bit stiff (did that really go down like this in the plays?). Either way, it’s a good, quick read for grantmakers of all kinds.

📚 Building a community, one evaluation reflection at a time. The good people over at the Centre for Cultural Value have just opened their Evaluation Learning Space. Great initiative and hopefully it’ll grow with lots of content.

DID YOU KNOW…

… that Semafor Africa’s weekend newsletters often feature topics on arts, culture, and the creative industries on the continent? The most recent issue, for example, looks a lot at collecting, art fairs and the like.

🇸🇩🇪🇬🇰🇪 One super interesting article I found in this last issue is about Sudanese artists who have fled war. The experiences of those living and working in Cairo differ significantly from those that have ended up in Nairobi. Big ups to Kenya!

RESEARCH | REPORTS | TOOLKITS

🌍 Silos slowly kill culture. Or always have, I reckon. This report by the World Cities Culture Forum and Andani.Africa says it looks at the future of creative cities in Africa. Despite it not really living up to its title (very little futures), the research findings are important to reinforce the same points that we seem to experience in many parts of the world: the need for more data and the sharing of such, the need for more local knowledge to inform policy, the need for more inter-ministerial and inter-sectoral cooperation. The last one in particular is worrying: 50% of respondents complain about a silo mentality in policymaking that holds culture back. Overall, a nice collection of vignettes of a bunch of cities across Africa and their cultural policy landscapes.

💰 Could culture impact bonds be the future then? Deloitte has released the latest edition of their Art & Finance report. It’s looong but there are some interesting nuggets. For example, public investment in culture seems to be decreasing while private interest in it is growing. Then, there is some talk about culture impact bonds, akin to social impact bonds – something I have always found intriguing and is probably gaining more traction now that culture is declared ‘a global public good’. And, finally, Deloitte’s Italy office had some fun playing around with Social Return on Investment (SROI) and developing their own take on the UNESCO Culture|2030 indicators and how museums or galleries could apply them. Not sure how I feel about the estimation of the Colosseum’s social value at EUR 77 billion, though.

✊ It’s time for cultural mobility justice. There are reports you skim and there is writing you want to take time to read and reflect on. This one is of the latter category. In this research-reflection-call to action for On The Move, Ukhona Ntsali Mlandu weaves through Black radical feminism, collective care, reparations, visa colonialism, emotional labour, climate change, illicit financial flows, healing justice, and much more.

This process is to be rooted in a commitment and in taking tangible action to redress inequities, eliminate harm, centre collective care and solidarity, and use the most marginalised identities as a benchmark for integrity in achieving mobility justice.

ART IN BETWEEN

🇬🇭 Tropical modernism in Ghana is a great lens to learn more about the country’s history, as this V&A short-doco illustrates. Architecture can tell stories of oppression and liberation, of aspirations and disappointments, of politics and aesthetics, of places and people, of climate and culture. This video is 12 minutes well spent to brush up your Ghana knowledge – give it a go!

THINGS I MIGHT WANT TO BUY

🧟 A card game but different. Like you don’t try to win the game, you instead try to win life. Dreams and Disruptions had me at “Step into a world where chaos meets creativity, and uncertainty becomes your playground.” Coming straight from the Philippines, this (actually pretty serious) card game wants us to collaboratively explore what could be – you know, preferred futures and all. Glancing at the cards, the possible scenarios promise to be a lot of fun – yes, there are also zombie apocalypses.

🧠 Pinterest but better. It’s called mymind. The idea is simple: you browse along your day, see something worth clipping for later use – to look at, to read, to watch etc. – and simply right-click and add to your mind. The mind, then, saves it in a really sweet interface and does some AI magic with it (auto-tagging and showing you similar content). All private. So far, I have clipped beautiful report designs, clever data visualisations, and some collages. Perhaps I can use it also to save concepts I want to come back to. So far, it works quite nicely for me, but I am unsure if I am willing to shell out a monthly fee for the tool once I hit the maximum free item threshold of 100. Anyhow, beautiful minds for everyone!

We need your help!

My good friend Linda Weichlein and I have been invited to conduct a workshop at the 2024 German National Cultural Policy Conference. Since the conference is about post-polarisation and narratives, we wanted to expand the conversation beyond the German viewpoint. So, we decided to build an inspiration library of international cultural policy narratives that celebrate togetherness (in all shapes, forms, types, and sizes), or those that can be applied and championed through cultural policy. We already have quite a few examples (Indonesia’s gotong-royong, Bolivia’s Ministry of Cultures, Decolonization and Depatriarchalization, the concept of Belonging, to name just a few) that our workshop participants can discover and explore, but we want more – and this is where you come in!

📨 What to do:
→ Share with us resources or point us in the direction where to find more fascinating cultural policy narratives from across the globe: