June 18, 2022

Pink Dot is an annual lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) pride festival in Singapore, taking place in 2022 on 18 and 19 June. The community-based festival is named Pink Dot because the colour pink is often associated with LGBT, the pink colour of the Singapore identity card, and the city-state’s small dot size on the world map.

In early 2020 just before the COVID-19 pandemic, the creative cultural industries (CCI) contributed US$2,250 billion to the global economy and accounted for 26.5 million jobs worldwide. A year later, more than 10 million jobs and US$750 billion in CCI goods and services were lost globally.

In ‘Conjunctions of resilience and the COVID-19 crisis of the creative cultural industries’ (International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2022), Professor Audrey Yue (NUS Department of Communications and New Media) writes about the creative cultural industry (CCI) crisis and its practice of emergency resilience. By examining various policy reports, studies, and Pink Dot, Prof Yue argues that ecological resilience – focusing on the long term, digitalisation, and decentred networks – can nurture fair work, artistic innovation, economic growth, and cultural vitality.

The CCI crisis began around early March 2020 and continued over the next few months until summer that year when some countries gradually reopened. The most significant emergency measure was job relief support for creative professionals. In addition to income loss compensation, other mitigation measures focused on business support, education and training. While these measures slightly had offset wage loss and provided basic digital skills for artists to quickly pivot online, they ignored non-traditional forms of cultural work, and the role and needs of cultural workers, who are considered the original ‘gig’ economy workers.

Precarity has long been a norm of cultural work, where jobs are frequently short-term, poorly paid, insecure, uncertain, and non-unionised. These jobs often attract workers who blend work with identity and creativity, and are more willing to undertake voluntary self-exploitation to pursue what they perceive as their passion. Rather than adapt to emergency short-term stop-gap measures such as quick-fix digital training, urgent reform is needed to recognise the ‘flexicurity’ of cultural work.

Where emergency resilience highlights short-term adaptation through mitigation, ecological resilience emphasizes long-term adaptability through learning, robustness, innovation, and flexibility.

Ecological resilience is evident in Pink Dot’s longevity. It started with 2,500 people attending in 2009, rose to 26,000 in 2014, and even reached 20,000 in 2017 when foreign participation and sponsorship were banned, highlighting the long-term commitment to its fight for LGBT recognition. Pink Dot’s adaptability relies on a decentred strategy and a network of resources: community leaders and volunteers, paid and pro-bono artists, private donations from individuals and local companies, and an audience base of resident-citizen LGBTs and their allies. Decoupled from governance and public management, it shows how ecological resilience can generate a resource pool of social and cultural capital to build and maintain an enduring queer cultural institution that has evolved with its decentralised networks of sponsors, organizers, and patrons.

In Asia, where cultural digitalisation is accelerated, and in Singapore, where marginal groups like LGBTs face continued persecution, ecological resilience presents greater opportunities for formal and informal CCIs to thrive sustainably and inclusively.

Read the article here.