The legacy of tourism has a reputation for being toxic. Cultural exchange has historically felt less like an equitable sharing between consenting parties, and more like extractive industries promoting gimmicky cultural events that showcase art and artifacts without respecting or compensating adequately the communities and cultures from which most ancestral practices and knowledge are derived.
Even with protective designations like the UNESCO World Heritage Site, which bestows legal protection onto landmarks or areas considered to be of "outstanding value to humanity," few business models and cultural institutions center culture-keepers, artisans, wisdom-holders and indigenous elders when creating distribution and revenue models.
Quantum Temple, a Web3 platform designed to preserve and compensate culture keepers for their cultural artifacts and heritage, seeks to change this paradigm. In this BFF Twitter Space, we speak with Quantum Temple founder and CEO Linda Adami, an an Italian-born political economist with more than ten years of experience at the intersection of public policy, economic development and technology in emerging markets across Central America, South East Asia and the Middle East. We also learn from the expertise of Quantum Temple advisors, Professors Vibeke Sørensen and Steve Lansing.
Edited excerpts:
I'm an anthropologist. I've worked for many years in Indonesia. In 2011, the government of Indonesia asked me to help create a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape in Bali. There was no obvious stream of benefits to the people in the communities or the kinds of things that made it into an intangible world heritage.
I knew nothing about the blockchain, but Linda introduced me to the concept and explained that the purpose that she's trying to achieve is to actually create a stream of two things, really: First, creating a stream of benefits to the creators of these forms of cultural heritage. And secondly, to acknowledge their rights so that they're not just [the subject of art.] Film crews come in and out, they make their movies, they leave but the NFTs make it possible to credit, acknowledge and convey the intellectual property to the creators. So I was captivated and I'm still captivated because it's a solution, I think, to the problem that we have struggled with with respect to creating ways in which the creators of these wonderful things can actually achieve benefits and in that way make it possible to preserve them.
I'm an artist and also a professor and in the arts as a composer, but mainly new media for quite a few years. I work with a lot of technology.
Being in the arts, of course I knew about NFTs and working with big data, I've been interested in large data spaces that include multimedia. And one of the big problems in the arts is tracking how images, or for that matter, any perception-based medium, transforms — including in collaborative work. I've been working with many technologies as it preceded the blockchain to try to do this. And so when [Web3] started appearing a few years ago, I became very interested, of course, and was following in particular with archival materials. We also have a museum studies program in Singapore, and distributed archives are very important. There's always been some [questions bout] how do you deal with images and visual art, and [blockchain] was a perfect fit.
But at the same time, sitting in a global community where we're talking about people participating from many different cultures, there's also the question of how do we bring in in a respectful way, in a way that potentializes, the possibility for people to be creative but also be recognized. I intersected with Steve on that point, and then Linda, of course, brought it up to the present time with the beautiful project that they have to provide a way to give back to the indigenous people and the creative communities so that they can be part of this and incorporate their their cultural heritage.
During the Pandemic, I had the fortune of spending quite some time in Indonesia, especially here in Bali, and that's when I got familiar with the structural challenges that the culture heritage was facing. For those who don't know, the economics of cultural heritage really depend on the tourism sector for distribution, because that's how cultural heritage is currently funded.
As we all know, during the Pandemic, tourism was fundamentally halted all over the world. Predominantly, all of the communities that were working in the sector were incredibly challenged. Here in Bali, for example, most of them were forced back to farming and they had no way to provide for themselves for over two and a half years. Now, luckily, tourism is slowly recovering, but it's certainly not before at the same level as it was in improper pandemic times. In addition to that, beside the dependency on tourism, tourism overall, despite being an incredible value and wealth generator, for those that don't know, it generates $9 trillion or 10% of GDP pre-pandemic, of which 40% is cultural tourism.
The United Nations World Travel Organization has estimated that every $100 that are spent on a tour holiday, only $5 actually stay in the developing economy when that is a developing country. So we already know that tourism, again, despite being an enormous wealth generator, that value is not equally shared among the communities who are part of it — especially cultural tourism, which represents 40%.
So I began to think about, how can we really disrupt that? How can we bring more equity into the space? Through my knowledge of blockchain — and then in 2021 seeing how Web3 was becoming a new socioeconomic paradigm — I began to think that this could have been incredibly valuable, especially the tokenization of culture heritage, in order to achieve two main objectives: First, the major archival processing, documenting culture through an immutable and decentralized public fashion so that it can be available generations to access and learn from. Secondly, to unlock new regenerative funding model for communities that can be transparent and more efficient, thanks through smart contracts.
Everything really starts with a multi stakeholder partnership. So what we're doing could not exist if it wasn't with a strong partnership with the ancestral communities and local institutions first. So our engagement starts with communities. When I talk about local institutions, we mostly work with culture and through the ministries and authorities and in conjunction with curatorial, anthropologists like the likes of Professor Steve Lansing and many others, and content creators to collectively co-create NFT collections that are showcasing expressions of what UNESCO defines as tangible and intangible cultural heritage in a way that unlocks transparent benefit sharing for communities.
Just to expand a little bit on the partnership model, which I think is very important: When it comes to communities engagement ... we're about to launch in 2023 our first collection, which is based on Balinese culture heritage. But w've already been working with three other communities and countries institution in three other parts of the world. So very excited for what's coming up ahead in 2023.
As for bottom-up community engagement, which is very important, we applied to a UNESCO framework called Free Prior and Informed Consent, which establishes a compliant framework to engage and work together collaboratively with indigenous and local communities worldwide. Because what that means is really making sure that all of the NFTs that have been generated, especially on the Quantum Temple marketplace, have been in fact co-created and comply with the local community's desire and ambition to be part of this initiative.
When it comes top down with our work with institution, we work in conjunction with ministries of cultures and tourism and tourism authorities. As you all know, Web3 is a new paradigm, a new technology. It's heavily unregulated. So we are now championing more of a pilot framework. That's why our native marketplace is not open, like an OpenSea approach. We really need to understand how digital assets, cultural, intellectual property, regulatory frameworks, and also filming permitting within the context of NFTs will be regulated from all the different countries in which we are operating. That's why we work with institutions directly to understand how do we do it in a compliant fashion.
Even before everything gets exhibited and launched on our marketplace, that's everything that happens operationally on the back end.
For more insights, listen to the full conversation with Linda, Steve and Vibeke.
This is not financial advice. If you don't want to spend money investing in crypto or Web3 — you don’t have to. The intent of this article is to help others educate themselves and learn.
