curious patterns #34
Now is the time of seapunks, planetary cultural policymakers, and cubist evaluators.
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.
Before we dive into the curious, the bad, and the ugly, I want to celebrate two things:
🥳 curious patterns just reached 1,000 subscribers. And you all have signed up from 91 countries (love that!). Please share this newsletter with more friends and colleagues if it brings you joy.
🖥️ edgeandstory, my consultancy, just launched a new website. It’s got a full overview of our projects and also a section with community resources:
→ edgeandstory.com
And a quick announcement: In the next couple of months, I’ll be passing through Manila 🇵🇭, Bangkok 🇹🇭, and Jakarta 🇮🇩. Let me know if you’re around and would like to meet for a coffee ☕️ (or a milk tea 🧋 iykyk)
Seeing Antonio Gramsci being cited by everyone and their mum was not on my bingo card for the beginning of 2025.
If you have no idea who this fella is (presumably, you haven’t had a hard academic crush on him like any good leftist cultural policy student), let me show you the (somewhat poetically translated) quote in question from the brain behind the cultural hegemony theory:
The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.
I can see the appeal. And if the current clusterf*ck in the States, the raging wars and genocides in Palestine, Myanmar, Ukraine plus so many other places, and the global crash of the development industry house of cards are anything to go by, we’re in for quite the year. May the wood snake be kind to us 🐍 (I am an earth snake, by the way)
To lift your mood (hopefully), here is my 2024 playlist of fav new releases (seriously, listen to Ezra Collective’s God Gave Me Feet For Dancing – god knows we need them):
→ (RE)CLAIM!
🤘 Describing a moshpit as an individual act of catharsis and a collective expression of emotion is probably the most poetic way to talk about Indigenous metal culture.
🇨🇴 Wanna know what brings Romanian forests, ancestral knowledge, furniture flatpacks, and smoking doughnuts together in Colombia? Hint: it’s architecture.
🇸🇾 People in Syria are not quite sure how to read the new rulers. As rebel group, they implemented strict bans on art; now, they seem somewhat cool with artistic freedom.
→ TO CENSOR OR NOT TO CENSOR
🌏 My favourite data storytelling studio Kontinentalist has published a mini data story on the pilot results of the Southeast Asian Artistic Freedom Radar I contribute to, yay!
🇨🇲 Self-censorship has taken over to the point where the system no longer has to exercise it. A familiar tune. Quartier Mozart in Yaounde is a beacon of artistic freedom.
🇨🇳 POV: You’re one of the most famous Chinese contemporary artists but DeepSeek wants to talk about something else – Ai Weiwei vs Chinese gov in the age of AI.
→ WAR AND PEACE
🇲🇿 Dear furniture and interior designers: your rosewood designs might well be fuelling armed conflict in Mozambique, Chinese smuggling gangs included.
🇺🇦 Gotta give it to the Russian disinformation engineers: targeting a Ukrainian video game by scaring its players they might be conscripted is pretty nasty mind wars.
🇹🇭🇲🇲 Chiang Mai is probably where Burmese art is most vibrant these days. This is both a sad and a happy circumstance. Military back home, solidarity in Thailand.
🇪🇺 The EU’s new culture commissioner wants to position culture within the security debate. Is it to get a piece of the funding cake or perhaps really a paradigm shift?
→ The security debate is also precisely one that edgeandstory is targeting in its new research project on how arts and culture address fragility, peace and stability in different contexts, commissioned by the British Council. Stay tuned!
→ IS IT SUS?
🇫🇯 Remember when the UK gov thought it was a good idea to have dancers retrain as engineers? Well, Fiji thinks the arts a great way for young people to make a living.
🇲🇽 Utopia – now also in your neighbourhood. What an epic experiment of community centres in neglected CDMX neighbourhoods, concert hall and Aztec sauna included!
🏙️ Sometimes you gotta zoom in to see the full picture. Henning Larsen asked teenage girls how they would do urban planning. I think we need more of that.
🍜 We have a new SDG indicator on minimum dietary diversity. I wonder what an indicator on minimum cultural diversity might look like. Any takers?
🎤 Culture goal or no culture goal in the post-2030 agenda? The Culture2030Goal campaign wants to hear your opinion – survey open until 30 April.
→ RANDOM BITS AND PIECES
⚖️ There are niches and then there are niches in niches. A year in review through the lens of art law: AI regulation, copyright, heritage laws, restitution – they’ve got it all.
🇷🇺 The U.S. drops the ball (to put it lightly) and Russia swoops in with tried and tested public diplomacy methods. Africa is the target – not exactly Trump’s fav, is it?
🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia has poured an insane amount of money into arts and culture over the past few years. Probably a good time to learn more about some key folks in the sector.
🇬🇧 Prescribing drawing classes at the museum saved the NHS £1,310 per person in fewer GP visits. If those numbers don’t make govs happy, I don’t know what will.
👓 Are you an improver or a reimaginer? This quick analysis of opinion pieces on the future of development shows us the great divide: disruption or incrementalism. I’d like to picture myself a reimaginer, but I still fall into old thinking patterns too regularly.
IMPACT
🧪 Evaluation is a vast field of methodological geekery. How about an inventory to better grasp the many different paradigms, methods, approaches, uses and and and? In this video, Sara Vaca and the godfather of evaluation Michael Quinn Patton introduce their Periodic Table of Evaluation, which you can also download on their website. This is a brilliant resource for those of you that want to do a bit of scoping out the evaluation field and perhaps get inspired by what’s already been developed.
🧊 Talking of geekery, let’s look at an evaluator’s art history analogy. Julian King had a go at cubist evaluation. And I like it. He is advocating for mixed reasoning, not just mixed methods. Honouring multiple perspectives as opposed to channelling funder-centric faux-objectivity resonates a lot with me. It’s precisely what allows diverse narratives to challenge dominant ones and creates space to see what else might be possible. Will definitely try to incorporate some of that in future evaluations.
🐶 Who’s a good bo … country? Finland is, apparently. According to The Good Country Index anyways. Seven categories, five indicators each, all countries ranked against a global average. Some of the indicators are pretty neat: You export weapons? Not a good country! Low ecological footprint? Have a treat! The interface is super nice, too, in case you’re more interested in the UX than the data.
🗞️ I can hardly watch news on TV anymore, and even reading online news often turns my stomach. Let me introduce the antidote: The Most Beautiful News of 2024. It’s a lovely little idea on how to present information. Notice how box size indicates the level of awesomeness of the news item? We need more of this. Some might call it escapism, I think of it as celebrating hope.
🎨 Data physicalisation is artistic practice. Melinda Sipos shows us how data does not just have to live in databases and dashboards. She took an artistic approach to making sense of quantitative data. And it’s beautiful. I am feeling the strong urge to make a trip to the DIY store and get some supplies for my next research or evaluation project.
DID YOU KNOW…
… that on 25–27 June, there will be two awesome sessions on The role of culture and heritage in shaping solutions for development at the 2025 Development Studies Association Conference? 🎓
Together with Ian Thomas (British Council) and Sofya Shahab (Institute of Development Studies), I will be co-convening these sessions as discussant. We got 9 promising papers for you: some more framing and theoretical, others super hands-on.
You can join the conference either in person (Bath 🇬🇧) or online if you’re interested. Of course, there are loads of other sessions as well, all under the theme of Navigating crisis: dangers and opportunities in development. See you there!
RESEARCH | REPORTS | TOOLKITS
🌎 The current culture x sustainability discourse is not radical enough. Christiaan de Beukelaer and Miikka Pyykkönen call bullshit on the shallow sustainability commitments of national actors that want to position the creative economy as a driver of sustainability (when sustainability is rarely even defined). Current cultural logic is anthropocentric – duh, follows a growth paradigm – definitely problematic, and serves national interests – new perspective to me, but makes perfect sense. Their new idea is to decenter humanity and put planetary wellbeing first, which is obviously incompatible with a perpetual growth ideology. And this is how we get a planetary cultural policy. The paper explains really well why we need it, but it stops short at going into detail what this could look like or how it could be achieved. Who is going to take on policy formulation?
🌱 Cue regenerative cultural policy. I would argue that regenerative cultural policy is very much planetary cultural policy, as long as we don’t treat regeneration not as the new sustainability without re-thinking the very underlying conditions. Lucky us that Mafalda Dâmaso and Bethany Rex edited a special issue on this topic (around 50% open access). In the framing article, the editors define regenerative cultural policy as such:
We propose to define regenerative cultural policy as an approach that supports cultural practices of production and consumption which restore and enhance not only cultural ecosystems and communities but also their natural, social, economic and political contexts.
Carla Figueira and Amy Fullman endorse that notion and focus on this angle:
[…] cultural policies as an aspect of culture that can support a thriving conceptualisation of life within planetary boundaries, contributing to societal, environmental and economic wellbeing of humanity in a caring approach to the more-than-human world.
I am not going into the details of each article, but I really like the social learning embedded in the value-creation storytelling idea. Take some time and go read! I am pumped that this topic is starting to gain the traction it deserves.
ART IN BETWEEN
A few weeks back, while in Singapore, I went to the Singapore Art Museum to see a show by Robert Zhao Renhui (on secondary forests – fascinating!), but the real winner for me on that visit was another exhibition taking place at SAM: Mansau-Ansau by Yee I-Lann from Sabah, Borneo.
Initially captivated by her and her collaborators’ woven bamboo pus mats, the high-pitched screams of a video installation drew me to the far back. Turns out it was a warrior cry. PANGKIS (2021) features a trad/contemp dance and a seven-headed woven hat (which was also exhibited). The video below is an excerpt and hopefully enough motivation for you to want to learn more about Yee I-Lann’s work, which deals extensively with colonialism, neo-colonialism, and counter-narratives.
WHAT ELSE?
💻 It’s not only AI that needs massive data centres. It’s all of your digital activity. Yes, that “noted with thanks” email. Yes, also those cat videos on TikTok. That emoji you sent to your family WhatsApp because you’re too lazy to interact with your mum’s not quite so veiled criticism of their neighbour’s renovation choices, too. Let’s Bend the Curve is a brilliant article with loads of graphs and a calculator for your own digital eco-footprint to explain where this may lead, what the big tech issues are, what developments are on the horizon, and how you can contribute (or not). And while we’re at it, I’ll also point you towards the Web Sustainability Index where you can have websites analysed for their sustainability. I tested it. The edgeandstory main page does well, but my work page needs work. Will see if I can reduce image file sizes to make it less heavy. Now you!
🌊 What’s Solarpunk but in Southeast Asian? Seapunk! For months now, I have had an issue of LONTAR, the Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, sitting on my nightstand. I think it was probably just a matter of time before I found the subversive bubble that is a bit more hands-on with desirable futures in a distinct Southeast Asian flavour. Yan introduces us to the concept of SEApunk/Seapunk, which led me down a little rabbit hole finding the community page of this solarpunk imaginary for Southeast Asia run by Sam Chua, and the Digital Humanities Un-College at Chiang Mai University (zenarchism anyone?). All a bit too techy for me, but I remain curious and signed up for the Telegram channel.
🪧 The art of signposting is something Lisa Doeland and Daniel Barber have seemingly mastered. This conversation about climate change (and more) with the grand title Buildings Born Ruins: Philosophy and Architecture After the Apocalypse expertly weaves through Arundhati Roy’s The Pandemic is a Portal, the wasteocene, Anna Tsing’s meditations on capitalism (The Mushroom at the End of the World is already on my reading list), and an essay of lived apocalypse and hope by Native American Julian Brave NoiseCat. There’s a lot of good stuff here to populate your reading list.
Please forward this newsletter to a friend, and do reach out: kai@edgeandstory.com
Congrats on 1K subscribers Kai. I found your newsletter from LinkedIn, where we’ve been connected for some time!