curious patterns #33
On portfolio approaches in cultural policy, collage as an evaluation method, and the artistic potential of embodied memories.
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.
I love seeing all the different places you are from when you sign up to this newsletter – welcome, kind people at Institut français 🇫🇷, Région Sud 🇫🇷, Swinburne University of Technology 🇦🇺, fika 🇩🇪, Dutch Culture 🇳🇱, European Cultural Foundation 🇳🇱, CREARE 🇳🇱, Turquoise Mountain 🇳🇱, University of Hull 🇬🇧, Ofcom 🇬🇧, Nordicity 🇬🇧, University of Leeds 🇬🇧, British Council 🇮🇩, Instituto de Desenvolvimento e Gestão 🇧🇷, Public Libraries 2030 🇧🇪, KEA European Affairs 🇧🇪, Museum Leuven 🇧🇪, Association Européenne des Conservatoires, Académies de Musique et Musikhochschulen 🇧🇪, European Network of Cultural Centres 🇧🇪, Andani 🇿🇦, University of Galway 🇮🇪, Trinity College Dublin 🇮🇪, AHO Oslo School of Architecture and Design 🇳🇴, Kulturrom 🇳🇴, 3dots 🇹🇷, Centrul de Proiecte Timișoara 🇷🇴, Artep Gallery 🇷🇴, University of the Aegean 🇬🇷, Region of South Moravia 🇨🇿, Kulturhuset Stadsteatern 🇸🇪, Culturalink 🇪🇸, City of Genoa 🇮🇹, Sapienza University of Rome 🇮🇹, and AEA Consulting 🇺🇸
Catch me if you can…
🇧🇪 I will be in Brussels in late January for a few days. If you’d like to meet up for a coffee, please get in touch (and if you ask nicely, I might just bring some nice Kampot Pepper or the best rice in the world from Cambodia 😬): kai@edgeandstory.com
🎯 In September 2025 it’s MONDIACULT time again, in Barcelona. If you want to know what might be on the menu, read the survey results (sadly just 61 responses).
🦛 Never let a viral sensation moment go to waste! I mean, you gotta use a hippo when you have one, am I right? Seriously, Thailand’s soft power is something else.
🇲🇼 I’ve got a soft spot for Malawi ever since I worked there in 2019. Chuffed that they now have their first cultural policy, with funding instruments and all the trimmings.
🇮🇩🇰🇷 We all know the recent power of hallyu, but did you know that Korea is also doing hangul diplomacy? An indigenous community just adopted the Korean script.
🇭🇰 We love to find a good cultural connection everywhere. China now identified the arts curriculum in Hong Kong as a vector for – you guessed it – national security.
🏦 2 billion dollars is quite a statement. That’s the amount Afreximbank will be funnelling into the Creative Africa Nexus (CANEX) programme over the next 3 years.
🌐 The interview with Justin O’Connor was the most clicked link in the last curious patterns, so please enjoy his latest paper on culture at the Summit of the Future.
🎄 Sucks for Ed Sheeran that Bono still doesn’t think that “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” is major cringe. Remember kids, always read the T&Cs!
🎮 Just throwing some keywords around, you figure out the rest: Creative industries for health and wellbeing. Gamer-in-residence. Children’s hospitals. Bloody genius.
🇸🇬 A view from Singapore on AI and the future of arts education. But perhaps not the view you would expect coming from this mighty little island nation. Thanks, Venka!
🇺🇦 Occasional edgeandstory collaborator Lina Kirjazovaite reflects on her recent visits to Ukraine. Read this if you want to understand how art is at war.
🕸️ What could a portfolio approach in cultural policy look like?
For a programme evaluation, I have read a lot of asset-based cultural policies in the past few weeks. Work with what you have and build on that – makes sense, right? It’s a great approach, especially if you’re cash-strapped. And when getting started with any kind of cultural policy formulation, an expansive stocktaking is an absolutely worthwhile activity. Ideally, this should not just include physical assets like your heritage sites and theatre groups but more importantly the systems and possibly informal structures the cultural sector has already built, the ecosystem that already exists. What I have observed with this asset-based approach, though, is that those in charge sometimes lose sight of what they actually want to achieve as they get too wrapped up in shinier, bigger, and more.
How about we give the portfolio approach a shot then? I don’t recall having seen a portfolio approach to cultural policy yet – please share if you have! And if you wonder what the heck I am on about, I recommend these readings: 🧱 for the basics, 🛶 for the next step thoughts:
🧱 Portfolios: How a multiplicity of approaches could help us get unstuck – UNDP
🛶 Rethinking Development: Advancing Portfolio Approaches for Systemic Change – Transition Collective
🛶 Portfolio Making: Embracing Distributed Governance – Dark Matter Labs
Massively simplified, it’s this → You define your overall mission, then you identify clusters of desired outcomes that serve that mission, and finally design a range of diverse, complementary, and inter-connected interventions that help to achieve the cluster outcomes. This way, you acknowledge the inherent complexity of many problems you are trying to solve. It also encourages experimentation and iteration as you’re never fully locked into a single thing. Some of the implementation bets you are taking will not work out, regardless of how much research and sensemaking you have done before – that’s exactly why you create a portfolio of approaches. Ideally, this is not a centralised activity since a purely public set of interventions would likely fall short of penetrating the complexity of existing systems.
The biggest issue I see for cultural policy, though, is that we are still really rather bad at articulating what arts and culture are trying to achieve in a global, national or local development context (and/or whether it’s supposed to achieve anything). We need to be careful not to fall back into the just more of everything trap. The other issue is that understanding cultural policy as a silo would actually be counter-productive. What if we were to see arts and culture as essential interventions for the complex problems we are trying to solve instead. Is culture just a problem or can it also be a solution? If this question keeps you up at night, you might want to look at The Missing Foundation, a report I co-authored two years ago.
I was originally planning to pepper this section with a very basic fictional mini-cultural policy portfolio full of heuristics … for illustration purposes … and then thought better of it. The whole point of a portfolio approach in public innovation (and more) is the acknowledgement of complexity and deep learning in the process.
→ So, here is my offer: If anyone out there is keen to experiment with cultural policy portfolios and/or portfolios that could include cultural policy approaches, I am very interested to join you on that journey, possibly on a low-bono basis. Get in touch and let’s have chat: kai@edgeandstory.com
IMPACT
🇦🇪 When heritage borrows from healthcare, we get a peek into value-based decision making, and I’m not mad about it. In fact, I think it’s a brilliant idea to explore how other policy sectors are organised. While I was initially drawn to this paper by Elena Raevskikh and her co-authors due to its attempt to create new indicators for cultural heritage mapped to the UN SDGs, I found this exercise of identifying core Abu Dhabi heritage values to serve as the foundation for heritage policy making much more interesting.
🖼️ Humans are a hot mess! Isn’t that the truth. Kudos to And Implementation for wanting to embrace all that beautiful messiness by introducing collage as an evaluation method – yes, the cutting, moving, layering, and glueing you probably have done as a kid. Why are collages a great idea, you ask? Because they can hold multiple truths and even contradictory ideas while allowing the collageur (? 🤔) to dig deep into their embodied knowledge. Big ups to Maya and Jennica for putting so much care into this 101 tutorial.
💌 Dear Evaluation Report, should you stay or should you go? The folks at TSIC are torn between the rigour and detail of a traditional evaluation report and the heaviness and power imbalances the format carries. So naturally they wrote a breakup and a love letter to their dearest evaluation report. Love this! Not least because I struggle quite a bit myself with finding the right balance between a bit more edge or just more story. Worth thinking how we can create more interactive and even participatory evaluation outputs, don’t you agree?
📊 Do you know your bar chart from your histogram? Fret not. This website helps you to pick the ideal visualisation format for your data. So, who’s ready for some sexy Sankey diagrams or a steamy stream chart?
DID YOU KNOW…
… that at edgeandstory, we have been experimenting with bringing artists into our evaluation, research and policy projects? Not just as mere service providers or report beauticians but as co-designers, co-researchers, co-facilitators. In fact, we want to expand these experiments for all the funk and wonder artists might bring to the process. Know any artists that are keen to walk the fine line between adhering to rigid frameworks and burning them all down whilst discovering the beauty in the cracks? Shoot me an email at kai@edgeandstory.com.
RESEARCH | REPORTS | TOOLKITS
🇻🇺 Kastom is key for disaster risk management. And when Vanuatu talks about culture in disaster risk management, they mean traditional architecture, food preservation techniques, inter-community food sharing, and temporary relocation sites based on family networks. State institutions will have to embrace traditional environmental knowledge since a rather impressive 97% of land is under customary tenure. Trying to go above local kastom would likely not go down well with the various communities in Vanuatu. So, culture becomes a prerequisite of engagement, a governance mechanism, and a source for finding solutions all at once.
🎮 Are we too damn smug when making policy recommendations? I just skimmed the ADB report on digital creative industries in Asia. There’s nothing in there that we don’t already know. Many of the recommendations are so common that many of us could have easily pointed them out ourselves. And I mean that in a good way – the report data really helps to bring the points home. Yes to stronger inter-ministerial coordination, yes to more data and evidence, yes to structured funding facilities, yes to investment incentives. But where we (as in the people that end up writing reports with data and policy recommendations) usually stop is at implementation modalities. We often don’t know how hard it can be to implement these things in (often weak or heavily politicised) public administrations. I feel like we need to move down the policy cycle a little, perhaps also work on feasible implementation plans and get our hands dirty deep in the systems of a particular administration. Where to start, though? No idea…
🔥 Quickfire round:
→ Why are projects and logframitis the evil you were looking for?
→ What do horny teenage girls and cultural heritage stewards have in common?
→ How can indicators do your culture and development advocacy for you?
ART IN BETWEEN
🇲🇼 Malawi take two. When I was working for Rei Foundation some four years ago, we facilitated a project that was to make available and activate all the work on Malawi’s intangible cultural heritage documentation that the foundation had funded over more than a decade. With the Malawi National Commission for UNESCO, the National Library Service, and Music Crossroads Malawi as the driving forces, a long and deep design process began. And now, it’s so incredibly awesome to see it having culminated in the Malawi Folklore database website. It’s multi-lingual, super visual, discovery-oriented, and incredibly easy to navigate. I am super chuffed this is live. Big congrats to Christopher, Mathews, Chimwemwe, and the Rei Foundation team 🎉
WHAT ELSE?
🦾 Hooray, AI tools are finally becoming useful. And a bit more imaginative, too, it seems. After having had some great writing advice from my good buddy Claude recently, I wanted to share with you the following tools that actually seem really promising: For the artists out there, exactly.ai is the antithesis to big AI feeding on your creative work without permission. Here you can have a closed model train on all your art and help create work in your very unique style. If you try it out, let me know if it’s any good. But what had me absolutely baffled is Google’s NotebookLM that can be your very personal research assistant after you have fed it a whole bunch of PDFs, spreadsheets, websites, audio and video files. It connects all the input and creates study guides, FAQs, and bloody realistic audio conversations (some may say artificial podcasts). It’s nuts – not always accurate and a bit repetitive but still bloody impressive. Listen for yourself – I fed it this very issue of curious patterns:
🧬 Memories do not just live in your brain. Research found that memories can also be stored in your cells. That means your entire body stores memories. Why do I think this is important? Think of all the embodied data that is available to us. Think about what this means for art, especially when we might have described things as visceral in the past. Think of the embodied practices for collective and social imagination. There is also a growing body of research on intergenerational trauma and how it can change DNA (→ epigenetics). I also recently read (sorry, forgot where, so might be total BS, who knows) that curiosity and defensiveness are processed in different parts of the brain that rarely allow each other to function simultaneously. I am not sure where I am going with this, but I find it absolutely fascinating.
Please forward this newsletter to a friend, and do reach out: kai@edgeandstory.com
Thanks again for putting together all those notes! I had fallen behind on my curiouspatterns reading but happy to be back!