curious patterns #9
Crypto art for Global South artists, culture's fight to be part of the next SDG round, and the potential of memes for arts education.
Welcome back to curious patterns, your friendly neighbourhood newsletter about all things culture, impact and development that shows up once a month in your email inbox 👋
New subscribers from the University of Leeds, Phare Ponleu Selpak, KEA European Affairs, ifa laboratory, and SP Knows - a pleasure to have you on board. Also brilliant to see some student signups from a recent virtual guest lecture I gave at my undergrad university, located in possibly the most beautiful town in Germany (and Poland).
🎯 The Sustainable Development Goals are good until 2030. International cultural networks are getting ready to not be excluded again. The advocacy race has started.
🇨🇺 Empty promises, empty hopes and empty cultural centres - Julio Llópiz-Casal offers an inside view on how Cuba's cultural policy fails its artists.
🤝 Make interculturalism great again isn’t exactly what I expected from a publication about fair international cultural cooperation. In fairness, it’s way better than it sounds.
🇲🇾 When you get excited about a new cultural policy but all politicians really seem to care about is racing for more ICH listings and global recognition. Really, Malaysia?
✊ If you’re looking for one of the most badass side-hustles ever, there’s a vacancy to become the next UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights. Call ‘em maybe?
🎧 After recent sustainability debates around crypto and NFTs, it’s probably no surprise that your music streaming is not just hurting artists but also the earth.
🇵🇾 Decentralisation, arts manager training, sustainability funds and cultural diversity - sounds a bit like a cultural policy dream to me. Go Paraguay!
🇳🇬🇧🇷 Black Atlantic cultural diplomacy is a thing, and it’s happening in Lagos. And who knew that personal heritage tourism is such a strong economic driver?!
⚖️ Do your participants know you have an agenda? If not, you might want to remind yourself about ethics in arts programmes for social change.
🇳🇱 Loving the project highlights in Prince Claus Fund’s annual report. But somebody please explain to me why all their money is in current and savings accounts.
🌍 If you need any more culture and development inspo, check out Culture at Work Africa’s ginormous programme report with background on all 33 projects.
⛓🤩 Is crypto the answer to our problems in arts or development?
Full disclosure, I am not a crypto bro. I don't even hold any cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin or Ethereum at all. But yes, the recent price surges (and crashes) had me listen up. And I'm not the only one who might see a little opportunity in this for artists in the Global South, the impact sector and wider development funding.
Truth is, even after these past couple of years, cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology are still for early adopters. This makes it somewhat exciting and dangerous at the same time. While trading is fully or partially banned in quite a few places, other countries such as 🇻🇪 Venezuela and the 🇲🇭 Marshall Islands have even created their own coins. And as the West is starting to regulate the hell out of crypto (in the best possible sense), development banks are cautiously touting the potential of blockchain technology to boost transparency of large-scale fund transfers.
We are in this odd space where seemingly anything can happen, so it’s time to position yourself: development or disruption? I won’t be talking about speculation risks or the aesthetics of digital art, some smart folks have already done that. Instead, I am going to look at the opportunity side of things. And even though I am very intrigued by the possibilities, please do take all of my ramblings with a sizeable pinch of salt.
First off, platforms distributing crypto art can connect artists with buyers that were previously inaccessible to them. Physical travel to acquire art is out of reach for a while and probably wouldn’t have benefitted many artists outside of the big centres anyway. Plus, many artists in the Global South are winging it indie, often to the detriment of their work’s discoverability. Quartz Africa’s Ciku Kimeria points out that crypto art presents a unique opportunity for artists to be themselves and occupy their own niche markets - because that’s what the internet really is, a collection of countless ultra-niche communities. But that’s not all. She also illustrates how blockchain technology is enabling artists to know all secondary buyers and create embedded and transparent rules for royalty collection. In reverse, secondary buyers (and perhaps law enforcement?) are always clear about any artwork’s provenance.
Sure, not every artist will make major sales. But that’s fine. If the works are suitable, an accumulation of micro-payments, as increasingly common in the creator economy, could also help pay the bills and fuel future artistic endeavours. Some artists might also want to think about minting sketches and concepts as a way to build relationships and monetise not just their cultural products but their processes.
From a technical standpoint, entry barriers to set up your own NFT crypto art sales are pretty low. So low, in fact, that these platforms could even challenge the traditional banking system by offering a financial instrument that is much closer to the individual. And if you are an artist operating away from your family, there is a new kid on the remittances block. Collectors, on the other hand, might be intrigued to buy crypto art by the prospect of directly investing into the artist rather than paying capital gains taxes in whatever regulating jurisdiction you are based.
Of course, sustainability consciousness demands more than one bottom line. The big platforms on which crypto art can be tokenised and sold have insane environmental issues in that area, which were rightfully called out by the global arts community. There are, however, eco-friendlier alternatives. Claire L. Evans at Rest of World has good things to say about the 🇧🇷 Brazilian Hic et Nunc platform:
Hic et Nunc (the name is Latin for “here and now”) is the black sheep of the crypto-art world, as it is an open-source, bare-bones platform being built collaboratively by a community of volunteer developers. It has no invite system and no gatekeepers—only a constant flow of images, interactive objects, audio experiments, and PDFs.
This community guide to eco-friendly crypto art has a list of several other platforms, including KodaDot, which is not only available in multiple languages but also seems to have active communities in South and Southeast Asia.
And then there is the 🇰🇪 University of Nairobi’s Bitange Ndemo taking things to a whole new level: What if countries were to tokenise and monetise their archives and collections of cultural heritage to generate public revenue while at the same time solving the issue of preservation 🤯
Other relevant applications in the field of development include cryptocurrency as an additional mode of fundraising for NGOs (folks, you know that your donation pages are in dire need of a UX overhaul anyway) as well as documenting and sharing data in blockchains. Having access to open impact data would be of immeasurable value to evaluators, funders and project designers of all sorts.
As you are probably thinking to yourself already, crypto and blockchain won’t be the single magic all-encompassing solution to everything that’s wrong in our sectors. I do urge you, though, to really take a good look at the wide range of possibilities this technology brings. I say, let’s bring some creative application to the party.
IMPACT
🔥 I love some good academic clickbait - don’t you? Here are Ten Reasons Not to Measure Impact for you. It’s much better than it sounds. In fact, it’s a great piece asking all kinds of questions around opportunity costs, messy programmes, and expected benefits from an impact assessment. And then there is the counterfactual - what would have happened without the intervention. As culture and development practitioners and pros of the imaginary, what does that mean for our evaluations? How rigorous can our what if be when culture in itself is dynamic and ever-shifting?
🗣️ To save a culture you might need a machine to learn its language. Wilhelmina Nekoto makes a powerful case for creatives becoming part of the fourth industrial revolution. How? Create or contribute to datasets that capture culturally significant and specific practices so that these find their way into the global data infrastructure. Because without diverse data, Western datasets will (continue to) predetermine the lens through which we will be conditioned to see the world. And we all know how that goes.
🧪 A lot of grantmaking is flawed - here are some thought experiments. The Indie Philanthropy Initiative has compiled a bunch of hands-on recommendations backed by well-thought out arguments to improve grantmaking. Probably the most intriguing idea here is spending down the endowment of a foundation to deliberately dismantle itself. Why would they do that, though? To intensively work on an issue with larger-than-usual resources in a given timeframe rather than falling into the trap of needing to sustain itself and the wider development industry. And may I say that strategically making ourselves redundant is quite the beautiful picture.
How Dare You Call It a “No-One’s Land”
✒️ Guest article by Mio Yachita, Upopoy - National Ainu Museum and Park.
I recently had the privilege to interview renowned artist, OKI. He is undoubtedly the most well known musician among those with a background of Japan’s indigenous people, the Ainu. OKI and his band, OKI Dub Ainu Band has performed on every continent in the last two decades, and brought life and soul back to their ancestral instrument, the Tonkori. When I talk about how incredibly original his music and journey has been, many people would interject and say, “but I didn’t know that Japan had indigenous people?” In fact the same reaction happens often within Japan, with a slightly different variation of, “Yes I’ve heard of Ainu but I didn’t think they were still around.”
This general misconception, or lack of knowledge, is also prevalent in Hokkaido, or ainumosir, which means the “land of Ainu”. Growing up in Hokkaido, I was taught that my ancestors traversed over the rivers and mountains as pioneers to cultivate an “untapped” land. We celebrated the development of the land in a peripheral territory of Japan. However as a child, I often felt disconnected to the traditions of central Japan that was supposed to represent my culture. It is only recently that I learned that my ancestors were not just new migrants from mainland Japan, but they were Japanese colonial settlers. It was not an untapped frontier as I was taught – my ancestors unilaterally claimed the land of the Ainu.
Ainu people lived not only in Hokkaido, but also on Sakhalin Island, the Kuril Islands, and many parts of the Japanese mainland. Due to the severe assimilation policies of the Japanese government, Ainu people were forced to have education in Japanese, denied their rights to gather natural resources, banned from some cultural practices, and had their land forcibly taken away. In my textbooks, centuries of Ainu history, their complex social systems, and hundreds of oral stories and tales, were treated as if they never existed. Ainu were finally recognized as Japan’s indigenous people by law in 2019. A lot needs to be done before the people in Japan understand that Ainu people are not just stories of the past, but their stories continue today. To this day, many chose not to reveal their identities, due to long-lasting discrimination and unfair treatment in society.
Given these circumstances, it is incredible that the artist OKI, who realized his ancestry after reaching adulthood, decided to interweave his racial identity and musical expression, and started performing on stage. In his iconic third album “No-One’s Land”, he quoted a recording of an opening speech of the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations, which he attended in 1997. The speech urged the audience to “make decisions on behalf of people seven generations in the future”. This was a well-known saying among Native Americans, which OKI draws a lot of inspiration from. It is a great reminder that our seven-generation journey to correct past wrong doings, has just began.
LIMINAL SPACE
🔒 Have you heard of the Manus Prison Theory? If not, do yourself a favour and read No Friend but the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani. This interview with Behrouz and collaborator Omid Tofighian digs deeper into intersectional modes of systemic oppression and the exploitative refugee industry. They ultimately want to challenge the system holistically by creating a different language and imaginary whilst actively disrupting the oppressive conditions. Centring insights by affected people in a new knowledge ecology through a mix of art, academia, activism and journalism is their toolbox. If systemic change is your thing, this is an essential read.
💰 What if you had one year to create without worrying about money? This essay is a bit off from what I usually would share, but the core idea is inherently fascinating: Universal Creative Income, or UCI. Having an angel investor write about how creators (you know, those YouTubers and TikTokers) need labour rights in a capitalist system that she herself subscribes to is a message in itself. Li Jin is obsessed with the passion economy and makes a pretty good case why UCI might not only be beneficial to the digital platforms that cash in on creator content but for all of us.
🇮🇳 Arts education is so 2010 - get ready for heritage memes! I mean, what better way to get kids into in art history than to memeify old paintings? I’m absolutely on board with The Heritage Lab’s Indian art meme generator and encourage you all to just have some fun. I am also entirely certain that your wit and humour will effortlessly upstage my amateurish attempt here:
OPPORTUNITIES
7 June: Online training module on Creative Economy (call for applications)
🎓 You from ASEAN, Timor Leste or PNG? And a public administrator or civil society arts manager? Great - this might be for you. UNESCO and City U London have an eight-week course on creative economy, and Korea picks up the bill. Win-win-win?
9 June: Cultural Management and Policy in Latin America (book launch)
🌎 Problem: Too little English-language literature on cultural management in Latin Americas. Solution: Get a bunch of kickass authors from Latin America together and publish a book. Now what: The book’s out and this is the online launch. Promising!
24 June: Informality and the Cultural Economy: issues and trends (co-learning lab)
🦜 I haven’t been to one, but co-learning lab sounds like damn cool concept to me. This one is with Avril Joffe and will look into the informal cultural economy and what this means in terms of regulation, social protection, access to value chains and other issues. I will likely be sleeping due to time-zone inconvenience, but you get in there!
curious patterns is a monthly email newsletter on all things culture, impact and development, written by Kai T. Brennert (Twitter | edge & story).
Please forward this newsletter to a friend, and do reach out: kai@edgeandstory.com