curious patterns #31
About barefoot arts managers, conditional philanthropy, and the most creative look to the future.
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.
Wow, what a surge in new subscribers! Thank you, kind people, for trusting me with your inbox: PHI 🇨🇦, Evoke Culture 🇨🇦, Inter-American Development Bank 🇺🇸, ArtsKC 🇺🇸, Xamk 🇫🇮, Stadt Freiburg 🇩🇪, Netzwerk Filmkultur NRW 🇩🇪, Stadtmuseum Berlin 🇩🇪, Project FUEL 🇮🇳, BOP Consulting 🇬🇧, English Heritage 🇬🇧, Sheffield Hallam University 🇬🇧, IFACCA 🇦🇺, Zurich University of the Arts 🇨🇭, Arty Farty 🇫🇷, Global Cultural Districts Network 🇫🇷, IDEA Consult 🇧🇪, KEA European Affairs 🇧🇪, Medeber Teatro 🇧🇪, KU Leuven 🇧🇪, Ministry of Culture Slovakia 🇸🇰, Eurecat 🇪🇸, Conexiones improbables 🇪🇸, NRC 🇳🇱, Hanze University 🇳🇱, Dutch Culture 🇳🇱, Beeld & Geluid 🇳🇱, Intercult 🇸🇪, Riksteatern 🇸🇪, Autonomous Province of Trento 🇮🇹, National Research Council 🇮🇹, Fondazione Comunità Novarese ente filantropico 🇮🇹, Fondazione Fitzcarraldo 🇮🇹, impensabile 🇮🇹, ECCOM 🇮🇹, Directorate General for the Arts Portugal 🇵🇹, Arts Council Malta 🇲🇹, ARC Research & Consulting 🇲🇹, Handicraft Chamber of Ukraine 🇺🇦, and the European Commission 🇪🇺
🇷🇺 Chechnya takes the cake for the most bizarre case of arts censorship this year: banning music that’s too fast or too slow. YouTube's music theory geeks are all over it.
🇩🇪 If you want to know what Germany’s development agency GIZ thinks about CCIs, here’s a 120-pager for you. Spoiler: section on monitoring and evaluation is a letdown.
🇳🇬 When I visited the National Museum in Lagos, I did not notice the swimming pool and memorial hall opposite. Now there is a new museum – and it looks pretty epic.
🇸🇦🇾🇪 Protecting and promoting cultural diversity includes not bombing the cultural diversity of others, right? Saudi Arabia and Yemen just ratified the 2005 Convention.
🍜 Music against poverty! Okay, enough polemic. UNDP looks at the music industry in crisis and post-crisis settings as an economic driver. Also has a nice IP rights primer.
🍄 What does the fungi want? Sounds nuts but is actually mushrooms (and algae and slime mould). Intriguing think piece on interspecies creativity and co-creation.
🇲🇽 Cultural archetypes impact how we evaluate the world around us. What if we were to re-imagine cultural archetypes of the future? Check out this Mexican experiment.
🛂 The EU makes 130m EUR annually from rejected visas. It’s almost as if rejecting visas was a business strategy. Thanks to LAGO Collective for the insights!
🤝 Isn’t it ironic that a podcast on fairer cultural relations with eight non-European experts is not available on Spotify in Cambodia? Luckily, YouTube comes to the rescue.
🇲🇬 Say what you will, but private patronage is still an important catalyst of local art scenes in some parts of the world. Madagascar has two big corporate foundations.
🥑 I know, the advertisement industry doesn’t have the best reputation in the arts world, but this is nice: life-extending stickers to encourage reduction of food waste.
🏝️ Genuinely impressed how you can write a report on CCIs in the European Union’s outermost colon…err… regions without actually talking about arts and culture.
👾 You have heard of Mr Beast, right? This article outlines the good, the bad, and the ugly of this YouTuber’s philanthropic exploits. Influencer philanthropy in the digital age!
💩 And here’s a shout out to Crappy Funding Practices. The essential industry watchdog for all grantmakers. Seriously, watch and learn!
IMPACT
📊 How can you not get behind democratising datavizzing? My favourite dataviz stories outfit Kontinentalist, straight outta Singapore, has just released their very own no-code data stories tool Lapis so you can do exactly what they do: tell important stories better. It’s still in alpha and some features aren’t fully developed yet, but you can get on the waitlist and be among the first to try it out yourself. I’m just waiting for the right opportunity to give Lapis a spin. Once I do, you’ll read it here first.
🧩 Patchwork is ok. I had never heard of bricolage before reading this article, but what they describe – the mixing and matching of evaluation methods to respond to programme complexity – sounds all too familiar. Tom Aston and Marina Apgar write about how layering and complementation of methods can be done carefully, in terms of function and power. It’s also a nice resource to learn more about various qualitative evaluation methods used in the international development complex.
🔒 I don’t know, conditional philanthropy sounds wrong somehow. Nesta’s cultural impact investing wing is throwing the idea of pay-for-success donating for cultural organisations around, calling it conditional philanthropy. In short, funders pledge support but only pay out upon agreed outcomes being achieved, backed by a rigorous outcome measurement system. I guess we’re fishing in the same waters as outcome bonds, though there risk here sits with the underwriter and not with the cultural organisation as it does with conditional philanthropy. I am all for more data-driven decision making, but I feel a certain ick about such restricted fundraising. Perhaps it’s two schools of innovation colliding? Anyhow, educate yourself with this Royal Shakespeare Company case study.
🃏 There is something about physical decks of cards. Maybe it’s the suppressed gambler in me. I just really like the idea of introducing physical elements into facilitation that would often just be a brain activity. The good people at Data+Soul have developed the Data Equity Deck and sell it on their website. Haven’t seen it in person and can’t vouch for it, though. If you image-search the Data Equity Deck, you can see some of the cards’ contents.
DID YOU KNOW…
… that the latest UN Pact for the Future draft finally includes a provision for arts and culture? (… and that 🇩🇪 Germany and 🇳🇦 Namibia are co-facilitators of the process?)
Action 7. We will protect and promote culture as an integral component of sustainable development.
9. We recognize that culture offers people and communities a strong sense of identity and fosters social cohesion. We reaffirm the role of culture as an enabler of sustainable development and in enhancing efforts to accelerate the 2030 Agenda by providing people and communities with a strong sense of identity and social cohesion, and by contributing to more effective, inclusive, equitable and sustainable development policies and measures. We agree to:
(a) Integrate culture into economic, social and environmental development policies and strategies as a standalone goal, and as a central consideration to enhance implementation of the 2030 Agenda.
(b) Ensure adequate investment in the protection and promotion of culture.
(c) Engage constructively in bilateral negotiations on the return or restitution to countries of their cultural property of spiritual, historical and cultural value, and strengthen international cooperation on this issue.
Whether you’re Team Standalone Goal or not, I think this sounds pretty promising to actually get culture properly recognised in the post-2030 agenda. Let’s watch this space!
RESEARCH | REPORTS | TOOLKITS
🌐 The Global South is an imagined place. A space from which to cultivate counter-cartographies, opening regions, potentialities, new configurations of memory, imagination, and investigation. This is one of the key learnings of the first South-South Arts Fellowship, facilitated by Living Arts International. The reflection report also digs into the constant mode of survival for many cultural practitioners in the Global South and the need for funding intermediaries and peer networks. The fellowship reflect that connections with peers across regions and disciplines are important, even without collaboration. And if collaboration happens, it should focus on the process and not be output-driven. Networks can embrace informality, structure isn’t everything. This is a very important documentation for everyone working on the topics mentioned above as it also reflect operational reflections.
📕 Finally, a handbook for application writing! The many times artist friends have come to me because they got frustrated with convoluted or outright ridiculous grant application forms and rules is a sad testament to the broken funding system we deal with these days. Prince Claus Foundation, being a funder themselves, decided to explain funding logic to potential grantees. Welcome to Funding Demystified! You’ll find a workshop concept (the handbook) and presentation slides that you as an intermediary can adapt and then present to your local arts community. It’s not changing the game, but it’s helping you to understand the rules better. Now, how about we get that translated into as many languages as possible?
🥰 UN 2.0, powered by art, culture, and creativity. UN Global Pulse is the United Nations Secretary General’s innovation lab and they declared a crisis of imagination. And artists might just be the key to imagine and realise better solutions to the challenges of our times. This manifest is putting the power of arts, culture, and creativity front and centre, highlighting the potential of cross-sector collaboration and innovation. This publication feels like somebody put into words what’s been brewing in my head for a while now. My verdict: a must-read piece that you can use as inspiration, as manual or as advocacy document.
Consider embedding an artist, or multiple artists within your team or organization. The point is not for them to make work in response (a crucial point of difference from the artist-in-residence) but to be an artist who can bring their worldview, questions, skills and contacts to the table during the day-to-day work, and in doing so spark a different mode of being, thinking, and working within others.
ART IN BETWEEN
📚 Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors is exactly what we need right now: hopeful futures (I kind of ruminated on that a little in curious patterns #30). Lucky for us, Grist is on it and published 12 stories that look at vivid, hope-filled, diverse visions of climate progress. Go read, be inspired, and feel the hope!
WHAT ELSE?
🌱 “Zooming in is the new scaling up.” Apart from this website looking absolutely stunning, the Future Observatory Journal’s first issue on bioregioning is well worth a deep dive. It’s a great selection of articles on design through the lens of bioregioning, for example local fabrication models in Rwanda and slow growth in Japan. The interactive forecasting article -shedding is particularly fascinating and highlights cutting edge initiatives from Pakistan, Indonesia, Ukraine, Wales, and other places.
🌊 Verbs are a vibe. Paiwan people have figured that out looong ago and we are just getting introduced to this beautiful way of acknowledging complexity through language. Verbs instead of nouns is great, of course, but it’s much more than language – it’s a whole worldview that opens up to you if you start recognising the entangled, the fluid, the embedded. I am grateful for these glimpses into diverse epistemologies.
🦶 Artificial intelligence and barefoot arts managers. Did that catch your attention? Great! This is for those of you that don’t mind venturing into other fields to gain insights for arts and culture. Maggie Appleton shares her (super digestible and visually pleasing) presentation slides and notes on – drumroll – home-cooked software and barefoot developers. Now read it and tell me, are arts managers barefoot per definitionem?
Please forward this newsletter to a friend, and do reach out: kai@edgeandstory.com