curious patterns #32
Cats in museums, rap against dictatorships, craftwashing, and the never-ending tale of development money in the wrong coffers.
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.
Beautiful people at Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts 🇹🇷, Ankara University 🇹🇷, UNICEF 🇰🇭, The Osborne Group 🇨🇦, Dutch Culture 🇳🇱, Prince Claus Fund 🇳🇱, European Cultural Foundation 🇳🇱, Andani.Africa 🇿🇦, Helvetas 🇨🇭, University of Münster 🇩🇪, German UNESCO Commission 🇩🇪, ALTER EGO (X) 🇫🇷, Circostrada 🇫🇷, Relais Culture Europe 🇫🇷, Institut français 🇫🇷, Living Arts International 🇦🇪, European Festivals Association 🇧🇪, UCL 🇬🇧, Social Innovation Exchange 🇬🇧, Systemic Innovation 🇬🇧, ArtsEquator 🇹🇭, Research Council of Lithuania 🇱🇹, Subtopia 🇸🇪, Swedish Ministry of Culture 🇸🇪, enjambre 🇦🇷, and Arcada University of Applied Sciences 🇫🇮 – thank you for allowing me into your inbox!
🌱 The 101 practitioner’s guide to regenerative practice in Culture. Bridget McKenzie takes us from the highly conceptual to the ultra-applied of tackling the Earth Crisis.
🎖️ ASEAN and the EU talk about everything. Except for defence and cultural policy. Why you ask? Perhaps the lack of institutional cultural cooperation mechanisms?
🇮🇳 Greenwashing, whitewashing, SDG-washing – welcome to the club, craftwashing! India seems to have a real problem with factory products being sold as handicraft.
🇦🇺 In Australia, they’re fighting against fake Indigenous art (and more) by legally recognising that intellectual property can be cultural and not just individual.
🇧🇫 Is making cinema a symbol of resistance, is it an act of stability in times of terrorist insurgencies and military rule? Burkina Faso sure has some stories to tell.
🇫🇷 Always good to know what France’s development bank-and-sometimes-agency AFD is up to working on CCIs globally. Lots of cash for heritage, but not only.
🇨🇴 Woven architecture. Regenerative design. Community construction. This project in Colombia is doing all of that as a very conscious form of practicing cultural heritage.
🇨🇳 China is taking gamification of cultural heritage to a whole new level. As in a 15 terabytes of data-large new level. Audience development slam dunk?
🇵🇰 Adding colours on the national economy rainbow: Pakistan’s Ministry of Planning and Development now has orange (creative) and blue (maritime) economy units.
🇰🇬 Often, the culture sector finds it hard to articulate why it matters in development. In this blog, UNDP outlines its theory of behavioural change through arts and crafts.
🇰🇿 Tax breaks work! Especially for micro and small creative enterprises, high taxes are a massive barrier. Kazakhstan has just shown us how to boost entrepreneurship.
🦠 Have you read Justin O’Connor’s Culture is not an industry book that went kinda niche-viral earlier this year? Here’s an interview with several of his core messages.
🇿🇼 We live in curious times and TikTok has given rise to spiritechpreneurs. Yes, in Zimbabwe, traditional healers have taken to social media to deliver spiritual services.
🇺🇸 It’s still painful when you see numbers confirm what you have been observing for a while: only 10% of U.S. development funding goes to local organisations.
🇰🇪 Hakuna Utopia, what a wonderful phrase. Hakuna Utopia, ain't no passing craze. It means there are micro-utopias to be discovered in Nairobi.
🌐 The G20 and the G7 are all in on culture. More excitingly, BRICS is also on the culture for development train (with a strong emphasis on economy, to be fair).
🇺🇳 Pact for the Future Conference done. Culture is in. Time to party? You decide…
Ensure that culture as well as sport can contribute to more effective, inclusive, equitable and sustainable development, and integrate culture into economic, social and environmental development policies and strategies and ensure adequate public investment in the protection and promotion of culture
✊ Protest Songs 🎵
A couple of months ago, I was lucky enough to spend a week with a group of artist-activists and socially engaged artists from around Southeast Asia. It’s safe to say that I came back incredibly inspired and ready to do my bit. But as any hard work, one needs a soundtrack. And what better music to listen to than protest songs?
🇰🇪 One of 2024’s most viral protest songs is surely Kenya’s Anguka Nayo, including its dance challenge taking over the short-form video services.
🇹🇭 In another instance earlier this year, I got to meet with the good people from Thailand’s Rap Against Dictatorship, an all-star hip hop group doing exactly what you think they would do. The video itself is also a massive political statement (→ 1976 student massacre) and don’t forget to turn on the subtitles.
🇵🇪 Hip hop, obviously, has a long and strong history of protest and defiance. In Peru, Quechua rappers like Cay Sur bring the indigenous resistance (in a place where using Quechua language alone is already an act of resistance).
🇰🇭 But protest songs come in many shapes and sizes. Cambodia’s Messenger Band uses all kinds of genres to sing about important women’s and labour rights issues. Here’s a more karaokesque tune:
🇩🇪 Bonus round: Die Schnitter is a (long gone) German folk punk band that (apart from a couple of their own songs) loves to interpret old German protest songs. I saw them live once in the early 2000s, and they were SO. MUCH. FUN.
Here’s some background info on some the songs they have taken on:
Moorsoldaten (Peat Bog Soldiers)
Die Weber (The Silesian Weavers)
Die Gedanken sind frei (Thoughts are free)
🎶 Please throw your favourite protest songs in the comments – I’d love to populate my writing playlist (and perhaps share it later here?)
IMPACT
🇺🇳 Everbody wants to rule the worl… wants to measure the economic impact of the cultural and creative industries. And for that, we need to agree what we are talking about in the first place. UNCTAD came up with a new framework of classifications to make it easier to measure trade in cultural and creative goods and services. I like that the document outlines the thinking process behind the new framework, and what flaws from previous versions were addressed. While reading all of this, let’s keep in mind that limiting arts, culture, and creative industries only to their economic impact is very dangerous (see Justin’s book above), so proceed with caution.
🇮🇳 Evaluation needs a Global South gaze. Pradeep Narayanan argues in very simple terms the different levels of neo-colonialism perpetuated by the evaluation ecosystem. I like how he carefully addresses the various dimensions and intensities of these activities, and how the ecosystem seeks (or appears to) change itself – sometimes successfully, sometimes less so. He proposes sindhanai as a concept for community leadership in evaluation for real decolonisation. Read for yourself.
🤖 Dear Claude, can you? Can you do data storytelling? Turns out, not just yet. Current AI tools on the market still struggle to pull together a full visual data story, even if broken into many parts and lots of adjustments. That being said, the step-by-step documentation of how The Pudding attempted to pull it off is still very impressive and even more educational. It’s like a trial-and-error tutorial. I mean, we are all just learning – humans and LLMs alike.
DID YOU KNOW…
… that Taylor Swift-ready is apparently THE new quality seal for large-scale cultural infrastructure projects? After Singapore upset the rest of Southeast Asia earlier this year by monopolising Taylor Swift’s regional gigs in exchange for government subsidies, the Philippines 🇵🇭 want in on the game. And what better way than to turn an old U.S. airbase 100km north of Manila into the country’s new large-scale entertainment hub, airport inclusive? It’s certainly a form of policy innovation, I would say. The symbolism of wanting to welcome American pop stars to a dismantled and re-imagined old colonial military outpost is also quite something.
RESEARCH | REPORTS | TOOLKITS
I publish this newsletter way too infrequently to keep up with all the new publications out there that are worth looking into. What to do? Having some fun with them (and skimming rather than going full ham) – obviously, duh?! I have grouped a bunch of texts for your convenience:
🥇 Do not return to work until you have read this front to back (and I mean READ it, not just downloaded and parked it on your desktop – I know you!)
Reflection Paper on Culture and Sustaining Peace: Probably the most comprehensive and yet most concise 360-overview of culture and peace I have ever read. No surprise, of course, seeing that my friend Regula, a seasoned practitioner in the field, has written this paper for SDC. If you only get to one paper today, make it this one!
So You Want to Build a Museum: It’s a toolkit, and a very good looking one at that. In addition to the common SWOTs and PESTLEs, there are many incredibly useful slides to help you think about your future museum in a focused way, including a vibe check. It’s like a ultra-niche business canvas on 108 slides.
🥈 Good for a geek-out in between, your third coffee of the day, or that break just before lunch when it’s not worth starting another big task.
Future of Arts & Culture: 300 leaders in the field of arts and culture identify drivers, forces, and impacts that will affect the future of the sector. Interesting data approach, vivid scenarios, maybe a little too abstract for some. Waiting for the deeper engagement with the findings.
Creating Futures: Art and AI for Tomorrow's Narratives: First of all kudos for trying out a new format – works really well. In terms of content, there are also some really nice nuggets and perspectives of art x AI that I hadn’t been familiar with. Plus, they’re not afraid to be political. Yay!
🥉 You’re waiting for folks to join that damn Zoom meeting and you know you have to wait at least 5 minutes for that ONE person.
Financing Arts and Culture in Tanzania: Tanzania has a public fund to provide loans to cultural and creative enterprises for job creation and socio-economic development. That’s pretty epic. This brief analysis proposes how the fund can better set up and managed. Good to stay informed.
A Cultural Relations Approach to Development: Love that somebody looked into that murky water where cultural relations and development cooperation meet. Don’t love that the analysis gets too hung-up on the soft power idea.
🎖️ Bonus category: Your best friend cancelled and suddenly your Friday night is free and you say f*ck it, that bottle of wine better not be wasted and get cosy with that PDF (it’s ok if you don’t remember everything on Monday)
Fa’ael – Training Guide on Facilitating Cultural Management in Challenging Contexts: Incredibly sad to say, but I guess there couldn’t have been a better time for this guide. The A-Team of cultural management and policy in the SWANA region (seriously, look up that allstar author ensemble – they’re awesome) put together 18 topics for experienced cultural managers to bring to cultural communities in distress. In fact, a valuable training manual for anyone in the space.
Extra special shout-out to Culture Unleashed for their amazing database of all kinds of arts management and cultural policy resource documents. Perhaps we should collaborate and index all the documents I have ever referred to in curious patterns 😉
🎓 One more bonus category: Academia strikes back. I guess. I haven’t read any of these books and papers (yet?) but wanted you to know they exist.
ART IN BETWEEN
🔠 I have an odd love for good typography. I’m not necessarily great at applying it myself, but I absolutely appreciate well crafted typefaces and creative use of fonts in design. Naturally, good type comes at a price. How great is it, then, to get access to a very well curated selection of freely accessible, high-quality typefaces? Go check out Free Faces!
That reminds me that curious patterns probably deserves a new wordmark and logo … now that it’s already been four years (🥳) since this little newsletter started. Any ideas for a facelift?
WHAT ELSE?
🇨🇳 No, the Middle Earth podcast is not about Lord of the Rings. It’s about China; China’s cultural and creative industries to be precise. And since most of us know way too little about what’s going on in this giant of a country, this podcast is an excellent starting point to learn more about China’s CCIs in all its innovation and quirkiness. Produced with a foreign audience in mind, I have thoroughly enjoyed the few episodes I was cycling through these past few weeks. Who would have thought that feminist literature is on the rise in China? Or that there are several somewhat remote villages populated by thousands of artists, forming new creative communities?
🐈 And while we’re on China, Shanghai Museum just won the audience engagement award of the year. Sort of. For their latest exhibition on ancient Egypt, they invited visitors to bring their cats along on a specific day. Whoever that millennial marketing genius is that came up with the idea, hats off! Two videos: the journo perspective and the vlogger POV.
Please forward this newsletter to a friend, and do reach out: kai@edgeandstory.com