Welcome back to curious patterns with monthly musings on all things culture, impact and development. Starting issue #5 with a tiny visual and structural refresh. What do you think? 😬
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🇨🇴 Did you know that Colombia has a Vice Ministry for Creativity and the Orange Economy? Now-Minister of Culture definitely has read his Creative Cities playbook.
🇹🇭 Did I just say Creative Cities? For the British Council it’s Hubs and Districts. Here’s an overview of creative districts in Thailand, including in my favourite town Songkhla.
📚 The African literature scene is spearheading digital literary culture. Instagram literary festivals, online-only book releases, literary blogs and all that jazz.
📻 The lo-fi tech revolution that ended up saving the day for many a student affected by school shutdowns: who would have thought that the humble radio prevails?
🤝 A new EU-ACP collaboration makes 26 million euros available to grow cultural sectors for economic development - in a region with almost 1.3 billion people.
🇱🇷 Read this neat breakdown of Liberia’s cultural policy, or the absence thereof. It has tales of a sold National Cultural Centre and how culture and folklore are not the same.
🇮🇳 Are hyper-personalisation and non-linear storytelling the future of India’s entertainment industry? With a level playing field and hardware localisation, maybe.
Can we be trusted? 🤑
If you have as much as dabbled in debates around development effectiveness, you will have come across the concept of direct cash transfers. There are the critical voices that say people cannot be trusted with cash and would, if at all, just aid symptoms. The proponents promise more bang for the buck (traditional development programmes often have insane overheads), trust in recipients to know what to spend funds on and an increasingly dignified way for people to receive gifts in times of need. More recent applications of blockchain-supported digital cash transfers show a promising way forward to decrease misuse and corruption (talking of cutting out the middleman).
Direct cash is also a strategy in participatory grantmaking, in which payouts would happen based purely on eligibility. Criteria, which ideally are crowd-sourced, will then determine who will be eligible to receive funds, rather than a committee or sole grants officer. The crux, of course, is these very criteria: Should they be needs-based, demography-based, impact-based, or a combination of them all? To an extent, direct cash is also an exercise in trust-based philanthropy, generally in the form of unrestricted, multi-year funding. For some grantmakers in our field, it also means supporting more individual artists instead of organisations.
Triggered by hearing the burnt-out voices of cultural workers on the receiving ends of development programmes, I wonder whether direct cash transfers are a viable funding mechanism in the field of culture and development. Could direct, unrestricted grants be a solution to some of the problems grantees face with volatile and competitive project funding that often can only ease symptoms or generate small-scale change? Can direct, unrestricted grants address root causes, though? I feel our thinking is far too often influenced by paternalistic assumptions that no-strings-attached grants (or direct cash) cannot deliver systems change. Free grants have the ability to liberate organisations and artists to do exactly that, in part because they don’t have to channel resources into securing new resources. At the same time, funders could use that new-found freedom to provide technical assistance and moral support for true solidarity with the causes.
So, from the angles of ideology and effectiveness, this doesn’t seem so bad. What about the practicality, though? Who is ready to take responsibility for experiments and possible failure? Who is ready to transfer agency and trust that artists, arts managers and other cultural workers know their communities and really understand the complex systems they live and work in? Who is ready to let go of established impact measurement frameworks and allow partners to formulate their own success metrics? It all comes down to how you understand yourself and what you want to achieve. Then again, that’s more ideology than practicality, right? 😉
IMPACT
✅ Want to avoid that external consultant telling you in what areas you suck? With this tool you can do a proper assessment of a wide range of organisational aspects for your own organisation. While the Ford Foundation uses the Organisational Mapping Tool to collect baseline data of their new grantees, you can simply do it yourself and take stock of your policies and processes, ranging from field engagement and communications strategies to financial management and evaluation plans.
📈 With 2021 being the year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development, cultural impact investing is now centre stage. The new Creativity, Culture & Capital collection of essays and insights wants to push the conversation globally - and with an annual growth of 12% in Global South CCIs, the world is bound to listen. Dive in with a great overview with definitions and explanations about the ins and outs of cultural impact investing, learn from a case study in South and Central America, read field notes from an African investor, and thoughts on how to get venture capitalists on board. In March, the initiative wants to hear from you. So if you are active in the field of cultural impact investing, please share your experiences.
🇮🇶 If you want to discuss the future, talk through art. UNDP’s Accelerator Lab in Iraq utilised visual art as a medium to have people imagine the future of climate in Iraq. Participants were asked to categorise their work in one of the generic images of the future: grow, discipline, collapse or transform. A disheartening 60% saw Iraq’s climate deteriorate, potentially leading to collapse. UNDP is now synthesising insights from the artworks to create local solutions. Meanwhile, take a look at the art.
🇪🇬🇹🇳🇩🇿 To evaluate or not to evaluate
Criticism is a Luxury: On the Effect of Evaluations
(2020: Mariam Abou Ghazi, Ilka Eickhoff)
Forces of Art is a fascinating book project. Three European funding organisations in the space of culture and development selected a bunch of researchers, handed over their project databases and asked them to zoom in on the effect the cultural activities of these grantees have on their societies. To get insights into some of these stories, listen to this podcast. I want to look a bit more closely at chapter seven: Mariam Abou Ghazi and Ilka Eickhoff decided to write about the effect of evaluations on arts and culture initiatives in Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria. And I’m here for it - let’s go meta!
The main argument Mariam and Ilka make is that not evaluation in itself is a problem but the context in which it is embedded and demanded. When European funders start imposing their agendas, create financial dependencies and competition, and suck partners into their own application and reporting modalities without engaging them meaningfully, things start to go awry. The authors go as far as identifying this practice as the European funding model. (side note: do you know any distinct non-European funding models?) But in the absence of other funding, cultural institutions keep biting the bullet.
No wonder that potential grantees play buzzword bingo in their proposals. As a former grantwriter myself I have been guilty of that, too. The flavour of the day in Europe rarely translates to the long term needs experienced and strategies formulated by local arts and cultural organisations. In the best of cases it’s misguided and over-institutionalised solidarity, in the worst we’d be talking of structural neocolonialism through the vector of culture. Let’s assume it’s the former. 😇
So, the overall framing of the granting practice is problematic - fair. But things really start to get frustrating when your evaluations take a lot of time, don’t ask the right questions and in the end the data you derived from these evaluations is withheld so that the sector as a whole cannot even benefit from the cumulative insight. Mariam and Ilka show us that this extractive practice is a key component of disillusionment among cultural operators in North Africa. The question is yet again, is this by design to build a superior knowledge and data base which can be used for control or have funders simply not thought about the negative consequences? Honestly, if this isn’t a call for open data projects such as Global Grand Central, I don’t know what is.
There really needs to be a space to have conversations about how art and cultural initiatives do impact societies and also where they fail. That is, if we as a cultural sector want to have a seat at the table when it comes to development cooperation budgets. Yet, some cultural workers understandably remain skeptical:
Art has an impact on individuals but we cannot generalize, nor regulate, control, or monitor this impact. As art is not happening in a vacuumed life and we have no real power to make an impact. We as artists or operators cannot claim this power, especially if it is imposed by the European institutions.
A problem might indeed be the evaluations themselves. The article’s analysis of evaluation designs is - speaking as an evaluator - sadly not all that much surprising. Many funders still value quantitative over qualitative data and outputs over outcomes, while for the grantees proposals and evaluations become performative. So, how then can evaluators and funders from the Global North be more empowering and work in true solidarity? The authors suggest flexibility and honesty:
An evaluative formula that is flexible enough to provide space for change and growth as the institution manages to look more into qualitative results rather than quantitative results seems more adequate and responsive to the given critique.
Yes! I am a big advocate for locating evaluations at the learning end of the compliance-to-learning spectrum. But, as the authors also acknowledge, the shift might need to happen at the very beginning of how granting is practiced. If grants remain competitive, extractive, performative and unrelated to local demands, evaluations will become futile exercises that don’t serve local needs either. One way to imagine the future might be long-term relationships with operational instead of project support that gradually strengthen these institutions. Trust and technical support could leverage local resources that would otherwise be stuck in managing a plethora of different and likely meaningless reporting modalities.
Big kudos to all the interviewees for their hard talk and to Mariam and Ilka for facilitating the dialogue, listening and amplifying these sentiments. In fact, being a deep listener is probably the most important trait of a good evaluator. Funders, this is an important read to hear about the problems we are creating for the very people we hope to empower and work with.
MEDIA
🇨🇳 China’s creative industries are not focused on the individual genius. Xin Gu and Justin O’Connor discuss key ideas of their book Red Creatives: Culture and Modernity in China in this podcast. And you might also learn about an unlikely alliance of China and France in international cultural policy.
🌐 Can cultural and creative industries be sustainable? Yes, another podcast about a book; this time Global Cultural Economy. Kim-Marie Spence and Christiaan de Beukelaer look at how creatives operate within and across borders, the legal regimes that regulate that work and (broken) government promises.
🌊 COVID was not the only crisis shaking Asia’s arts scenes last year. Yet, there is incredible innovative spirit and solidarity among culture workers and academics in the region. If you have only little time, watch session 3 “Culture in Peril” of this virtual ANCER conference documentation. And as always with ANCER, it’s a brilliant mix.
The Bad Activist 🇻🇳
From pop star darling to outspoken dissident and human rights activist, big tech critic, and musician wandering between folk, jazz and experimental sounds, Đỗ Nguyễn Mai Khôi has a colourful life and career. Mai Khoi, as she performs internationally, is now focused on a new project combining all these passions in a new performance and film production of her own, The Bad Activist.
A fascinating concept you were introduced to recently?
I am inspired by and think a lot lately about the concept from Indian writer Arundhati Roy who likens the pandemic to a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. She said: “We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
An artist with an urgent message?
Vietnamese Musician Ngoc Dai has an urgent message in his song “Chúng ta không còn nhiều thời gian” (We don’t have much time left). I totally agree with this message especially now, at this unique point in history when we are facing a confluence of crises - the world is on fire, our governments have failed to protect us from the pandemic, racist authoritarianism is on the rise - we need a sense of urgency, to do something to safe the world and our future.
A question worth asking?
A question worth asking is: When will this all end?
OPPORTUNITIES
3 February: Artists are Human Rights Defenders: Launching ARC’s New Safety Guide for Artists (online panel)
A new practical guide for artists under threat - great. First-hand experiences from outspoken and formerly detained photographer Shahidul Alam and exiled Belarus Free Theatre director Natalia Koliada who just recently received death threats from a Belarusian state newspaper - even better. Tune in, this promises to be a brilliant panel.
15 February: Heritage and Development (call for case studies)
A colourful group of heritage professionals started the initiative OurWorldHeritage to find sustainable solutions for heritage management, potentially even to have cultural heritage be a driver of local sustainable development. If you’ve got a case study that other practitioners can learn from, send it in. It’ll feed a broader project of knowledge sharing through workshops, databases and long-term monitoring.
22 February - 2 March: Heritage and Our Sustainable Future (online conference)
Heritage and sustainable development - take two, but this time a bit more macro. The programme isn’t online yet, but this conference seeks to connect heritage research with development practice on the ground, especially in the Global South. They hope to carve out some policy recommendations and a research agenda - good on you, folks!
curious patterns is a monthly email newsletter on all things culture, impact and development, written by Kai T. Brennert (Twitter | edge & story).
Send a message, share your feedback or reach out with content recommendations for future newsletters - I’d love to hear from you: kai@edgeandstory.com