ICOFOM 2014

The annual ICOFOM symposium, where I have presented a slice of my recently concluded doctoral research ('Crowdsourcing as Playful Labour'), has concluded in Paris a couple of days ago. Being my first international conference in museology it proved to be an extremely enriching experience, in spite of quite a few hiccups mostly due to the inherent structure of the conference itself.

Structured in plenary one-hour presentations in the morning and shorter, 20-minute presentation workshops in the afternoon, the conference was carried out mostly in the French language, in spite of the majority of the audience understanding and speaking more than fluently English. While I do recognise that ICOFOM includes French as one of its official languages, the choice to privilege it, surely due to the conference location, caused more than one mishap when conjugated with valiant, but less than professional level translation services: most of the conferences, especially the plenaries, ended up being completely lost on non French-speakers, and a few heads were scratched when presenters in French answered questions in perfect English! The only logic conclusion is that the preponderance of presentations in French was politically motivated: hopefully the following conferences, perhaps led on more neutral ground, will turn the abundance and variety of languages spoken by ICOFOM members into an advantage rather than a hindrance.

The plenary conferences, while showcasing some very big names in museology (again, especially French), suffered from widespread 'angry intellectual syndrome': many presenters, given the echo chamber of ICOFOM, displayed the tendency to deviate from lucid and systematic presenting, descending into less than pacate rants on extremely generic topics - usually the degeneration of museums into lunaparks, or an irate defences of French New Museology against the Anglosaxon usurpers. This was more marked in those presentations that lacked any kind of visual support, a grave lack at an international conference: it is simply impossible to follow a hour-long speech without any kind of visual anchor.

The afternoon sections, smaller and more intimate, proved to be overall more engaging and, being thematically themed, perhaps more relevant to the specific interests of their audiences, integrating the very general - often generic - themes of the morning plenaries. I have followed mostly those tied to the 'Museum Ethics in the 21st Century' and 'The Participatory Museum': overall excellent reviews of the state of the art in museum-audience interactions and relationship, although I think safe to say that such state of the art continues along the well-established paradigms of the constructivist and educational museum, with little new under the sun. Among the more interesting presentations: Nicole Moolhuijsen on Old Masters and museum participation; Lydie Delahaye on the categories of museology; and Lynara Dovydaityte on the contested participatory museum.

Overall, the conference has been a great occasion for networking and getting to know the museological crowd, with which I deal only occasionally; and a good chance to get exposed to the dominant discourse among professionals. We can only hope, however, that we will see soon an ideological breakthrough - next year perhaps!

Soon to follow will be a post detailing my reactions to some of the presentations, which I will get to work on once such material is made available online (as the ICOFOM organisers encouraged us to). The conference's program is avaliable here.