Anyone who works in culture knows that an annual report is not merely an administrative document. It is, at once, memory, narrative, and a mechanism of survival. It serves to provide accountability, justify decisions, and signal direction. But it also, inevitably, serves to shield vulnerabilities.
That is why many reports “lie without lying.”
The numbers are correct, the activities took place, the indicators were met as far as possible. Nothing is formally false. Yet something is missing: the invisible exhaustion, the unfunded time, the last-minute decisions, the forced adjustments made to fit reality into the funding framework.
And both sides, organisations and institutions, know this happens frequently.
Much of this tension stems from the way funding systems are designed. They are not perfect; none is. They operate through criteria, expectations, and the need to compare what is often not comparable. On the side of technical teams and juries there is professionalism, seriousness, and a significant burden of responsibility. That work is real and deserves recognition.
But the model has side effects.
When the survival of a structure depends on successive cycles of applications and renewals, the annual report inevitably becomes a strategic document. It does not only recount what happened; it recounts what “makes sense to recount” in order to secure continuity.
Here lies the first layer of silence: everything that was left undone for lack of time, people, or stamina. Everything patched together in haste. Everything achieved at the expense of personal precarity.
None of that fits comfortably in a report.
The dilemma is understandable. Artists and teams already operate under fragile conditions; exposing the full extent of those fragilities can feel risky. There is fear of being misinterpreted, of appearing incompetent, of losing support. There is also the justified sense that the system lacks mechanisms to accommodate nuance.
So the possible report is written.
What concerns me is not occasional omission but the cycle that takes hold. Year after year, official accounts describe stability where there is constant tension. Documents speak of continuity; people experience exhaustion. Gradually, the system learns to evaluate only what it can see -activity, numbers, targets – and not the human and organisational cost required to produce them.
When a report “lies without lying,” no one is exactly deceiving anyone. In reality, a project, a team, a trajectory is being protected. There is room for empathy here, because the effort behind these choices is considerable.
But there is also a consequence: it becomes harder to improve the system.
If reports fail to convey what hurts – what fails, what is unsustainable, what remains undone – public debate on cultural policy advances on the basis of an incomplete image. We continue reinforcing the idea that projects “work” when, internally, they are merely surviving.
I am not advocating confessional reports or lists of frustrations. I am arguing for an honest, adult language capable of acknowledging complexity without dramatization: what worked, what was possible, what was only possible at high cost, what should not continue to depend on sacrifice.
On the institutional side, this requires openness to read such honesty without automatic punishment. On the side of organisations, it requires the courage to narrate reality not as defeat, but as a working condition in need of evolution.
No funding system will ever be perfect. But it can be fairer if information circulates with greater truthfulness.
Perhaps one day reports will stop “lying without lying,” not because teams have changed their attitude, but because the system has finally learned to recognise what was always written between the lines.
Photo: © Stephen Dawson
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