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 live in Cambodia 🇰🇭, and I run the evaluation, research and policy consultancy edgeandstory.
I know, it’s been a hot minute since I last published. And I thank every single one of who in the past couple of weeks encouraged me to send something out again (you know who you are). Also a big thank you to the many new subscribers! So, here we go – curious patterns, issue 37 🥳
And to show you that I really haven’t just been sitting on my lazy bum all year, here are some of the (publicly available) pieces of work I was involved in recently:
🕊️ Art as Peace Building: An exploration of practices and impact scenarios of how arts and culture address fragility and conflict 🇲🇲🇸🇩🇸🇾🇺🇦 (→ British Council)
⚖️ Connecting the Dots: Fair Arts Practice in Contexts 🇰🇭🇨🇱🇮🇩🇰🇷🇲🇾 (→ IETM)
🎯 Southeast Asian Artistic Freedom Research and Documentation Resource (RADAR) 2025: Challenges to artistic freedom in Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam 🇰🇭🇮🇩🇲🇾🇲🇲🇵🇭🇹🇭🇻🇳 (→ ArtsEquator)
🇲🇲 Phoo Pwint Sa White Paper (out in August): Mapping and Sectoral Analysis of the Cultural and Creative Industries in Myanmar (→ Institut français de Birmanie)
And to those of you to whom I owe some work, I’ll be with you shortly 😬 🙏
🇸🇹 Funding an orchestra as part of a portfolio approach addressing social cohesion and brain drain in São Tomé and Príncipe – yes, please, UNDP!
🇲🇾 Riddle me this: everybody knows it’s there but nobody knows how to capture it. It’s self-censorship, dummy! In Malaysia, we now have a methodology to make sense of it.
🤷♂️ Cultural policy research is irrelevant. And, apparently, so is cultural policy consulting. Why? Nobody cares about the data that everyone always wants. Bummer.
🇸🇦 Even Saudi Arabia is slowly having enough of all the consultants running cultural government projects. Strategies lacking identity, impact dictated by ROI.
🇰🇪 The international development grant is dead – long live the export of Intellectual Property! That seems to be the new song the CCIs are singing over in Kenya.
👺 Tech bros are the new patrons of the art world. Or mini-Medicis as Lindsay Gellman calls it. I just am praying that we don’t get another Machiavelli out of this.
🇮🇳 Book your wedding crash today and get your desi bling Insta reel tomorrow! On the cringe scale that’s a solid 10 out of 10. But then again, who am I to judge? Balle Balle!
🇴🇲 Oman shows us how it’s done: a cultural visa to visit and to take up residency. Expectations? Contribute to the cultural landscape. Somebody please copy and paste!
🇮🇩 Indonesia’s former Director-General for Culture warns indigenous communities against falling into the trap of adopting the political grammar of “inheritance”.
🥞 Book shop by day, comedy club by night? Art supplies store on weekdays, art studio on weekends? Stacked spaces is where it’s at. Think ecosystem!
🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan is home to a Creative Industries Park with 130+ tenants. And has a special tax regime for the CCIs. And runs a CCI support fund. You go, Kyrgyzstan!
🇲🇲 Army vs ARMY. This is also cultural infrastructure – just different. Welcome to the Kpop fan communities turned armed resistance movements.
💻 When the Mozilla Foundation starts talking about arts and culture, you better listen. Welcome to the post-naive internet! So. Many. Amazing. Initiatives.
🪩 And as pretty darn random last news item, I am happy to share with you that we, at last, have found perfect randomness. What a time to be alive!
🐇 Follow the white rabbit …
… and you might just find the glitch in the public arts funding matrix.
Imagine you are Neo, somewhat cluelessly hacking away at the cultural policy environment that surrounds you but also feeding that nagging feeling that there must be more than this. A message pops up on your screen and you follow the white rabbit. To Sibiu, Transylvania, Romania. And there it is, the glitch in the matrix you have been looking for – you found it at last.
This is pretty much how I felt last month when I attended the AGM of my client Circostrada, the European Network for Contemporary Circus and Outdoor Arts, which was taking place during the Sibiu International Theatre Festival. Pretty town, weirdly German (→ history refresher), great weather, and an amazing theatre and outdoor arts festival. I saw some brilliant shows: a contemporary circus production around the theme of carpentry (including bucketloads of non-flammable sawdust), a massive Gulliver blow-up play in the main square, probably the most beautiful and tender puppetry show I have ever watched, a high-energy bamboo percussion techno spectacle, and a wobbly dance performance on unstable ground. Alas, only the Milo Rau shows were sold out before I made it to the online check-out.
During a tour of the Fabrica de Cultură, one of the festival directors shared with us that the city of Sibiu allocates 14% of its municipal budget to culture. 14 PERCENT! 🤯 There was also talk about an 18-19% return on investment. That same evening I went to investigate and found a paper from 2017 with somewhat similar numbers. Of course, it’s not Edinburgh with its insane ROI, but I keep wondering whether Sibiu is the public arts funding anomaly we have been waiting for, the case study of all case studies perhaps?
To be fair, I haven’t looked into the way Romania handles decentralisation – what policy areas are funded centrally, which ones are funded at provincial and municipal level, and how that impacts overall municipal budgets – but regardless, the number still sounds crazy (good) to me.
But hey, politics are never far when we talk policy. The former mayor of Sibiu is currently the President of Romania, the current Minister of Culture is an actor and long-time buddy of the director of above-mentioned theatre festival, and I have been told that the festival is now so big and important to Sibiu that it enjoys near universal support across the political spectrum in the municipal parliament – imagine!
But as a critic of economic indicators (you know, culture as foundational and such), the cultural and social impact of the Sibiu festival felt just as impressive. As Tallinn Fringe Festival Director Dan Renwick puts it: “Culture isn't an event that happens to the city, it's part of how the city works.” Sibiu International Theatre Festival’s curator of outdoor programming Dan Bartha-Lazăr told us how the local community always comes first and how the festival works with some 500 volunteers (no typo!) over several months to prepare them – I kid you not, there were groups of kids in red shirts scattered all over town and in the venues. Of course, not everything is always wonderful in Sibiu, either, but the festival has certainly turned me into a fan on what was my first visit to Romania ever.
In that sense, the festival is also a major cultural relations success. What I saw on the streets of Sibiu was nothing short of what the Brussels bubble usually wants to describe as the soul of Europe: a Bulgarian street art company getting the local Romanian population but also visitors from Italy, Austria, France and even Taiwan involved in testing out the self-made stage installation that wobbles and bounces, turning it into an early evening intercultural outdoor dance party.
Consider my cultural policy brain sufficiently blown. Wake up, Neo!
IMPACT
📊 UNESCO goes ecosystem. For those of you who have politely acknowledged the release of the new UNESCO framework for cultural statistics last year but ultimately refused to read it because, urgh, statistics, here’s a nice little fun fact: the framework represents somewhat of a paradigm change for UNESCO by moving away from cultural and creative industries (complete with value chain and economic indicators) and towards a cultural and creative ecosystem that creates various types of value in a more circular/cyclical manner. It’s honestly refreshing. And while I applaud this narrative shift, I am already afraid how hard it will be to communicate this very cross-sectoral framework to governments that really like their silos. In any case, please do actually look at this new theorisation of cultural value-generation. And if you got a hot line to your national statistics office, you know what to do.
🪞 Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest evaluator of them all? As an evaluator in the art space, it is not rare to be met with a weird mix of suspicion and curiosity. Yes, we are here to investigate your work – but we’re also your friend, believe me. A lot of that uneasiness around evaluation might come from a systemic misunderstanding (or misalignment) between evaluation and art. John O’Brien is on point when he says that “evaluators reach instinctively for outcomes, indicators, deliverables“ and that this actually misses the mark because “art is the original form of all research” and one that thrives in complexity and ambiguity, and should be treated as such. I very much resonate with the call for evaluation of artist-led projects to mirror the inherent artistic intelligence of being “relational, systemic, reflective.” At edgeandstory, we also try to honour the art as original research mantra by experimenting with artistic intelligence in our research and evaluation processes (most recently in our collaboration with Tanlume Enyatseng). But it’s not an easy journey, as it requires me to confront what John described in the very beginning of his article – we have a tendency to flatten and instrumentalise artistic work once evaluation enters the room. So I’m gonna leave this here for your own reflection and vow to do better myself.
🩺 Arts and health but without the art. I was initially very excited for this evaluation toolkit on arts and culture in the health field by Singapore’s Yong Siew Toh Conservatory. Flipping through the document, however, I became increasingly disappointed. Mind you, I am whining on a very high level here. The toolkit (which did not deserve this absolutely forced acronym of THRivE) has a pretty great introduction to evaluation and great overview of methods and scales, especially with regard to health and wellbeing interventions. What I found missing most of the time was the specific applicability to arts and culture in the evaluation methods. It feels like a health evaluation layer was simply placed on top of an arts programme. Perhaps I’m somewhat biased because of Pierluigi Sacco’s recent comment, but please take a look and tell me if I’m wrong here.
🍕 Bonus resource: Check out this creative evaluation toolbox straight outta Belfast that comes with a little quiz that matches you with your ideal method – happy days.
ART IN BETWEEN
🌲 What do Ocean Vuong, Elif Shafak, and Amitav Ghosh all have in common? (Apart from being some of my favourite writers out there, that is.) One of their books is currently growing in a Norwegian forest and will only be printed in 2114.
The Future Library is locking away manuscripts while growing a forest which will be used to release the books when the 100-year art project concludes (it started in 2014). This is Katie Paterson’s idea of a literary vault and environmental commentary – and a test to see whether the City of Oslo honours its agreement to protect the forest in which the future library grows.
RESEARCH | REPORTS | TOOLKITS
🏦 Museum development as international cooperation is a thing apparently. And in mind-boggling dimensions at times. Did you know that JICA, the Japanese International Cooperation Agency, extended an $800 million loan to Egypt for the construction of the Grand Egyptian Museum? Neither did I until I read this report on public development banks’ involvement in arts and culture. The annex also has a pretty useful overview of many projects these banks have engaged in.
🇵🇭 The Philippines are the first country to apply WIPO’s new Creative Economy Data Model. The diagnostic report is surprisingly easy to digest and very visual. What I wonder is how we are going to reconcile (or not) all the new UN-backed frameworks coming out of UNESCO (see above), UNCTAD, and now WIPO, all of which follow pretty different underlying logics.
🕊️ IMPACT’s Home of Hope has an excellent digital resource hub on everything arts x conflict transformation. Check out their lovely WhatsApp community, too, if you crave a little bit of personal connection.
💰 Figurative released a solid 101 building a fund for impact investing in the cultural and creative sector. In case you know people that have too much money lying around.
WHAT ELSE?
🧆 The house existed to be opened. It’s impossible not to click when the title of the article is The Gathering Was the Art: On generative third spaces and the architecture of communal love. And the article doesn’t disappoint either. Follow Samar Younes into an exploration of designing living spaces, designing community, designing belonging, ultimately designing relational infrastructure. And it’s so beautifully written, too.
🪩 Designing with entropy – sounds fancy, makes hungry for more. Think funding that treats uncertainty as a feature, consent that is a living contract and baked into datasets, and more.
🐇🕳️ The last thing you needed was a rabbit hole generator. Yet here we are. And if that’s still not enough to keep your tik tok brain absolutely fired up, how about some absolutely random but super fun design tools? You’re welcome.
Please forward this newsletter to a friend, and do reach out: kai@edgeandstory.com
Thank you for the shoutout! Glad our signals found each other.
Yay! So happy to see you back and thank, as always, for curating these for us. Now I have my reading and research cut out for me until the next time you come back with another gem 🤓