 Good morning everyone. On behalf of the German Museum Association and NEMO, the Network of European Museum Organisations, let me welcome you to this digital conference on museums and social responsibility. I'm your moderator for today. My name is Catherine Hickley. I'm a freelance arts journalist and write regularly about museum policy for the art newspaper and also contribute to the New York Times. We're happy to be able to report that 780 people registered to take part today and we're looking forward to a full day of exciting contributions from across Europe. You're welcome to contribute at the end of each session with questions for our guests using the chat function. Let me take this opportunity to remind participants that this is the first of three conferences on the subject. The second will take place under the auspices of Portugal's presidency of the EU in April 2021. The third will be organised by Slovenia in the second half of next year. So my first thought on being asked to moderate this conference is that social responsibility is actually what museums are all about. It almost seems like tautology to mention them both in the same sentence. ICOM may be struggling to come up with an exact definition of what a museum is, but even the old definition makes this clear. Museums are about people more than they are about things. They are to quote the old definition non profit institutions in the service of society. They exhibit the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment. During the coronavirus pandemic lockdown, it became clearer than ever that museums are one of society's most important meeting places for people and for ideas. At a time of polarizing opinions and social media bubbles, it's more important than ever to have a non virtual public space for dialogue across social divides. Museums were sorely missed when they were closed. And I'm sure you will have stories bearing witness to that. I hope we will hear some of them today. The reopening of the museums was eagerly awaited. I for one was straight on a train to Cottbus because Brandenburg was the first German state to reopen museums and went to see the Brandenburg State Museum of Modern Art as soon as it opened. But sadly, there are also many museums that will never reopen. It's an icon survey taken in April and May, as many as one in 10 museums around the world is threatened with permanent closure. As we're all aware, nearly all museums have been compelled to curtail activities. A third have had to lay off staff. All of this affects their capacities carry out their social responsibilities. Freelance museum educators have tended to be among the first to lose their jobs or have their hours cut. This logically means that museums are educating less than they were before the pandemic struck. The pandemic devastation follows a long period of time where the tasks of museums have grown enormously. I'm thinking of digitization, provenance research and outreach, for example, and budgets haven't necessarily expanded at the same pace as these fears of activity. Many museums were already overstretched even before the pandemic hit. We're discussing six areas of social responsibility in this first conference called values are revisited. These are community involvement, education and culture, employment creation and skills development, technology development and access and social investment. One of the downsides of a virtual conference is the lack of opportunity for networking and coffee breaks, but we have a solution. Please use the network function on your screen. In the breaks. A couple of other technical points that I'd like to make. First of all, we want to make clear that the only part of the conference that will be recorded for posterity is what happens here on the main stage in Berlin. The chat will not be recorded nor networking meetings. And please remember to keep your camera and microphone turned off unless you're speaking. So let me introduce our first speaker. Dr. Horst Klausen has been a reference light ahead of division at the German Federal, sorry he has been at the Federal Federal Culture Ministry since 1990. Since 2014, he's been responsible for visual arts museums and federal support for artists. He studied philosophy, art and history of literature in Munich and obtained a doctorate in history of art from Bonn University. Dr. Klausen, I'm happy to hand over to you. I'm very pleased to welcome you to this conference and want to thank the German Museum Association and Nemo, the network of European museums, organizations for the warm welcome and for bringing us together today. On behalf of the federal government, commissioner for cultural and the media, Mrs. Monika Grütis, I want to express our appreciation of the thoughtful conception and organization of this conference. We want to thank our great partners from Portugal and Slovenia for making this trial conference possible. And thank the distinguished experts for sharing their thoughts with us within the course of our program. The motto of the German EU Council presidency together for Europe's recovery describes the tough challenge for us, bringing cultural life out of the corona crisis. We want to make sure that culture can continue to fulfill its important role for European cohesion. As we all know, cultural and cultural diversity in Europe are at the heart of our great European project. They remind us of our common heritage and at the same time show us the way to a European future. All of us have experienced that across border cultural life and cultural corporations are most valuable pillars of our societies. The extent to which museums today reflect their roles as actors with social responsibility is expressed by the title given to this conference. We are convinced that culture and especially museums can make an important contribution to support social cohesion in Europe, especially in these difficult days. In May 2019, on the occasion of last year's International Museum Day, Neil McGregor delivered a remarkable lecture in Brisbane, Australia. It was hosted by the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art and had the note worthy title, Museums and Memories, the Stories that Make a Community. In this formidable speech, which is available online, he examined the ways in which museums around the world are attempting to exhibit the past in order to confront the future with confidence. When outlining future challenges for museums in May 2019, of course, at this point of time, even Mr. McGregor could not foresee the dramatic consequences that a new virus would bring to the world at large and our museums in particular. However, Mr. McGregor reminded us of the important call. Museums are places where the long histories, complex histories are acknowledged, discussed, debated, continued and very important are changed. For me, talking about social responsibility of museums is also very much a question of permanent change, a change of perspectives, a change of cultural awareness, a change of society expectations. The question of social responsibility of museums seems even more important if we agree that museums are more than just cultural institutions but playing a key role in defining and redefining national, international and communal identity. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm very excited about this truly European conference with the change of a constructive dialogue and an open debate on the role of museums. Thank you very much for your attention and your commitment. Our next speaker is David Wiel, who has been director of the Germans Museums Association since 2017. Before this, he was head of the Joint Office of the Swiss Museums Association in Icom, Switzerland. He's chaired NEMO since 2014 and has been a board member since 2012. He studied art, history, museology and business administration and gained extensive experience in network management at various museums and institutions. Additionally, David represents the museum sector and the German Cultural Council and is a board member of the Swiss National Centre for Cultural Heritage. Welcome, David. Thank you very much, Mr Klausen. And thank you to all of you, dear participant, to have accepted our invitation. As chair of NEMO, the network of European Museums Organization as director of the German Museum Association, I'm very happy that we take time today and tomorrow to speak, to think and to exchange about the museum and their social responsibility. The work of museum and museum networks are based on values. NEMO and the German Museum Association on behalf of the museum stand for collection values, educational values, economic values and social values. We believe that museums are social places. It means meetings places where different points of view can be shared as places with different people with different backgrounds and capabilities can access. So equality, diversity and inclusion are the basis of the social values we are promoting. We want museum to be recognized as organization that can have a significant social impact. And this conference is a great opportunity to reaffirm the social value of museums. Let me share with you some personal observation. When I observe the museum sector, I think that museum which exploit their social potential have three specific qualities. They are involved, they are open-minded and they are learning. Involved means that they are touched by what is going on around them. Political polarization, migration issues, insufficient consideration for minorities, generation challenges, revenue and wealth gap, use unemployment and all the social problem. Of course, museum cannot solve all the social issues but they can help to find solutions. I believe that museum have the potential to strengthen the social fabric of society and act as meeting places for different people. To play a social role, museum are not only involved in their time, in their environment, they are also involving people with different profiles. The second quality to be open. Open means welcoming everyone, open means in the corona crisis reopening as soon as possible. Actually, museum shouldn't have been closed during the pandemic. Our vision at least is that they should remain open and safe during every crisis. Open means accessible for everyone, analog and online, open means open-minded. Museum which exploit their full social potential are not afraid of multi-perspectivity. They make differences and visible. Though they are not place for truth, we know that they are place for knowledge negotiation. And means that museum are educated learning for their users. But museum strengthen their social role not only when they are places for education, they should be learning institution as well. For that, they learn from other sectors. They know and understand their audiences and their diversity. They learn from their audiences. They trust the creativity and the competency of their employees. They organize education and training program for their staff. They have a lean and efficient administration and they adapt their structures and working processes to the. So museum are involved and involving. Museum are opened and open-minded. And when museum are places for learning and learning places, they can contribute to strengthen the social fabric of society. With you, dear participant, we want to redefine and clarify the question of the social responsibility in the museum sector. The field is large and wide. It's why this conference today and tomorrow is the first piece of free, as Catherine said. And as you know, Mr. Clausen mentioned it before, Germany has started the so-called trial presidency of Germany, Portugal and Slovenia. Together, the three countries will form the trial presidency of the EU Council of the next 18 months. And on the museum field, we have decided to draw from this picture and to develop a conference program with our colleagues from Portugal and Slovenia. So we are telling a story in three parts. Today, we focus on values. In April 2021 in Lisbon, we are going to speak about participation, networking, partnerships. And in September 2021 in Maribor, we are going to think about the future of social responsibility in the museum field. We are coming back to this trio conference this afternoon at quarter to four with Clara Camacho from Portugal and Alexandra Berberis Lanna from Slovenia, who are preparing the next conference. So thank you to our partner, the commissioner of the German federal government for culture and the media. Thank you for the organizers, the team of Nemo, the team of the German Museum Association, especially Claudia Schneider for the organization for coordinating everything today. Thank you very much to the speaker. Thank you of course. And to you, dear participant to be there. I wish you a great conference. Thank you. You're away from the border museum here in Berlin where we are to Denmark, which lockdown because of the coronavirus crisis in April 2020. The first question that trap hold was how can we support our society. This became the collaborative art piece Light Hope, which was created by 1000 participants from all over Denmark during the lockdown under the direction of the artists Rasmus Beckelfax and Hannah G. The art piece was ready for the audience when the museum reopened in June 2020. Lauren has been the director at the trap hold museum of modern art and design since 2010. She was previously a curator there. Karen sees the coronavirus shock crisis as a shock and a wake up call for museums to consider why we are here. She suggests we should learn from this and that we need organizational changes in the sector if it's to change in the long run to the benefit of society. Welcome your questions in the chat after her presentation. Good morning Karen. Thank you for inviting me. We're looking forward to hearing your presentation from Denmark. Thank you for having me to talk at this conference the social impact of museums. Just to introduce who I am. I am the director of trap hold museum of modern art and design in Denmark two hours drive from Copenhagen around 100,000 visitors a year. It is the lowest educated area of Denmark. So we work in a different way than a museum which is in the center of Copenhagen, for example. The museum is beautifully located. It's a large museum. Our collection is art, applied art and design, and it is like a place where people go for the day. And I've been lucky to be the director since 2010. Hopefully, I will start this video, which is about the art piece Light Hope, which was introduced just before. When the lockdown happened in Denmark, of course, we had terrible financial concerns about how museum, how the travel would survive, whether we would go bankrupt. But this was the same situation for all museums in Denmark. So we decided to focus on something else. How could we deliver to the Danish public? How could we create something which would give value for people who were now locked into their houses, who might feel isolated. And we then, over three weeks, very fast, taught with artists and foundations in order to create a big collaborative art piece called Light Hope. And the idea was that we would like all of Denmark to participate with these crocheted light bulbs, that they could either send to Denmark to travel, deliver, or deliver at this 27 different points in Denmark, because people volunteered to collect light bulbs. And the idea was also that people should be able to knit it with whatever they had. So the colors would be white, beige and yellow, which we presume would be ordinary colors in people's crocheting bags. And we also had a big Facebook which kind of exploded. People were really into this amazing Facebook where they shared ideas, they shared yarn, they shared crocheting needles. So this became a really lively community. And the idea was that we wanted to crochet all the way through the lockdown and then the day we opened this piece would be there. And we also installed the art piece during the lockdown. So we had all kinds of digital events. We had more than 800 people signing up for these events. We had to really, where we shared the building up of the exhibition. We also had studio visits at the artist. We had discussions, many different things. So, well, thinking of my problems starting this talk, you wouldn't believe it, but we really had a lot of digital new experiences that we bring with us into our new future. The art piece, the opening had to be a digital too, because we could not gather the thousand people from all over Denmark who participated. So we made this music video, which you can see just the pictures from, in order to make an experience for people where they could kind of get an idea of what they had done. And then over the summer people of course came to visit the museum. For us, this was, we could do this because we have a practice in the museum where we work with big scale collaborative projects. So we know many artists and we also know how to deal it, how to build up a project like this and how to involve people. What is a key when we make these projects? And during my presentations, there will be different pictures from different projects we've done over the years. It is that the artist makes a framework, but inside the framework, the participants contribute with something they really master. In this case, they could really, they had the chance to show how well they would crochet or how they would experiment with crocheting. So the mastering is, the form is done by the artist, but the crocheting mastery is by the participants. I'll just see if I can, yeah. This is, with this, I would like to start the discussion about what are museums here for. And I would also say that this is an obvious thing for us to do because we work with applied art and we actually think applied art that is like being really good at doing craft in some kind. But many people are good at it, but maybe they're not so good at form, so we need the artist to make the big form. What are museums for? Well, originally museums were made in the 19th century to educate people and what was educated? Educated meant that we, you learn to know, got knowledge through different displays. This is the old fashioned idea about how to be educated. And of course, today to be educated is not just to know, it is to understand multiple simultaneous perspectives. And we take this very serious at Tophall, so we do not just transmit knowledge. We work very much on how do we understand the multiple simultaneous perspectives there are to any issue. We always say we don't give answers, we give questions. But to come into what museums are here for, I would like to introduce an economic way of thinking or looking at museums. So I have used the Boston Matrix, which is kind of a very simple framework to look at museums. And in this framework, people talk about the market growth and market share. If you have a business and museums are businesses, you can look at this this way. If you have, for example, the word cash cow down here in the right down corner is when you have a large market share of something but low growth and it doesn't require a lot of investment. Whereas you can have a shining star up here is when the market is growing, but you also have to invest a lot. You also have sometimes a low market share with high demand, but low returns. This is when you have a startup, a new idea where you have to invest a lot, but you don't know whether you will have any returns depends on how the market develops. And also, sometimes we have something which is not interesting at all. There is no market and you don't have any market share. I have used this model on the museum world. And this is from the perspective of an art museum in Denmark, where there has been a lot of focus on that we should earn our own money. We are like considered as if we were in an ivory tower and museums are attractions and we should just make people pay. And if people won't pay for what we deliver, then we're just not performing well enough. That has been and we have had lowered the support from governmental and municipality funding over the years. This is the situation in Denmark at least. So if you look at museums from a market perspective that we are here and we are attractions and we have to generate incomes. If you then look at what we do in the museums, you can use again the word market growth and market share. And if you look at what we have to offer in the museums, you could, for example, look at our stars. Here, the star is the special exhibition, which we have to kind of invest a lot in in order to transmit, classically transmit knowledge to our visitors who are customers. But we also have a cash cow, which is our museum building the shop, the cafe where people come and they consume, and they spend money, which we need in order to keep the museum going. This is, I'm telling you, this is from the perspective of the economic values in museums. We also in many museums have what we will call question marks. So outreach projects, engaging with audiences, new ways, participation, school services, very often with the constructivist view on how to work as a museum, being involving in dialogue with our surroundings. These in this model are question marks, because in this understanding that museums are attractions that generate income, we have to see these activities as activities in order to create new paying customers. So we will have a school service in order to make children come back with paying parents. And if they don't do that, it is a dog down here, and we have to liquidate it. It will not, it doesn't make sense to make all these projects if they don't turn out into paying customers in this perspective. And in this perspective also collections at least in Denmark are not really considered important and research now, because that doesn't necessarily give more income. Actually, they're just really expensive to keep. But are these the most important bottom lines is the economic bottom line, the most important bottom line in museums. I would say in Tappold, we work with five bottom lines. Of course, we have an economic bottom line, which is about funding and both public and private funding, which we need in order to run the museum, which is lowered these years. But we also have what we call the visitor bottom line, which is connected to the economic where we make these special exhibitions and we need a ticket income. We need a blockbuster in order to have people to come in. But we also have what we call the collection professional practice bottom line, which is our research, our collection care, our collection development development. And we also have what we call the civil social professional practice bottom line, which is about being democratic engaging empowering participatory and research. And then we have a fifth bottom line, which is what I call the organizational or we call it, because if you want to be a museum in a particular way, we would say, then the organization also has to reflect what we communicate. So we need there to be a correspondence between front stage and backstage. We need to have, if we want non-hierarchy in the museum, we need a non-hierarchical organization. And as you can see here in the right corner, I just put in some of our projects. I will not come into them. It will take too much time, but you can look into them later if you're interested or give me questions about them. So if we dig into the civil social needs in society, the need is, well, we could see when the market died in the lockdown, it was a terrible thing for the national economies. But if we look at it in a larger perspective, we have big challenges in our society in the moment. The political confidence crisis. We have knowledge crisis. We have fake news. We have human crisis, loneliness, stress, depressions. We have a climate crisis. We have migration crisis. We have inequality, growing inequality between people. And we have a need for creativity and learning and at the latest, the COVID-19. But as I see it, COVID-19 is not the same as the previous ones. The previous ones are structural challenges, whereas COVID-19 is something that came in but was not caused by the structures, but it shows the problems with the structural problems. So addressing this, I would say from this perspective of this bottom line, the market is growing. If you look here at the left, the market is growing because we have more needs. We have all these challenges that we need to address. So this is a very big need in the society. If you look at the market share, well, the museums can then move into this area. I would say, I would claim that, well, the cash cow is maybe still the building because it is the framework, the architecture where we can perform our projects. But the stars are now outreach projects engaging with audiences, participation, school services and constructivist way of working. And I think the wake-up call with the COVID-19, you could see which museums were used to working with audiences being engaging. For us, it was not difficult to get the idea to create light hope. Whereas museums that are mainly with the tourists and have the main focus on regenerating income and with no focus on civil work had much larger difficulties in knowing how to live in this crisis. I see also, so in this situation, if you look in the left corner during the COVID-19, definitely the museum shop and the cafe, they had nothing to do. They were closed. They were not important. And from the social society needs where we have the climate crisis, where we have social crisis, all kinds of crisis. These are not the important things to do in museums. Actually, engaging is the star. This is where, in this perspective, where we should invest and bring the museums to come. Then I have the question mark. What is the role of the collection and research in this? And I will come back to this in a moment, but I'll just go on to something really radical. The social movement has been in museums for many years. And many of you who are participating in this conference, you are working with civil and social engagement in your museums, I presume. And we had a really radical movement coming up here in the latest 10 years with Art O'Til, with the front figure, Tani Baguera, who proposed a really radical thinking of museums. Actually, they proposed that we need users for art within society. We use artistic thinking to go to the current issues that we should discuss. We should replace authors with initiators and precipitators with users. So, in this perspective, the idea is that people should not go to be entertaining museums. We should use the artistic way of thinking to become activists in our society. The movement has been strong and you see it in Holland, you see it in the UK. And I've been very much inspired by it, though I do find there are some challenges in this very radical way of seeing what museums should be. Because I went to visit MIMA in Middlesbrough, which is one of the front museums who have really, really created, really gone this way to be very activist. And changed their audiences from coming from all over the UK to see exhibitions, to have the same number of visitors, but people being activists in the museum. So I went there last year, but what meant me when I went into the museum was a space like this. And for me, coming and being inspired, this was not an interesting experience to see a room where some other people had had some interesting experiences. So I was thinking, should we leave totally being ordinary museums with collections? And now I'll come back to what the possibilities in our collections hold in my perspective or in my view. They hold a very important, another discussion, which comes back to what I also addressed, the need to address the problems with loneliness, with stress, anxiety in our society. Because art holds some very strong phenomenological potentials. For many years, the focus has been on transmitting art history to transmit information, to transmit economic ideas, how much is the value of this art piece. And if you think about television programs, it's very much about the value, the financial value, and is this art or is it not art? But actually, what we need is a discussion about the phenomenological, the experimental potential in museums. And we did a project a few years ago in Taipold, seeing slowly, it was called Inspire Pipe, the book Seeing Slowly, where we invited audiences to sit for three minutes or more. And we have worked with this for many years. People were really, really thoroughly engaged with just the invitation. They never thought that they should just sit down and relax with the art pieces. This Seeing Slowly is something we worked with for many years. We make projects with people who have stress and anxiety, using a method we have developed through different ways of making people sit down and try and feel themselves. And for me, I see as a social role of the museums, collections hold an extremely strong potential here if we start using our collection this way. It doesn't need to be very expensive. We can do it with our own collections. We did a research program where we had a researcher to follow a two-year project with people with stress. And significantly, it said the results say that this works as well or maybe even better than if you use mindfulness. And so I'll just say that the social potential for museums is not only for activism, but also for using our collections in this kind of ways. So if you look at the two models, I suggested museums seen as attractions, the financial view, or museums seen as at the civil social bottom line. How do they work together? Because the reality is, honestly, we really need to earn some money because we have lower public funding. And also when we get private funding, we need to very often the private foundations, they want to support big extravagant exhibitions. So it's very much on the economic bottom line that we need to take that with us, though many of us really believe in the civic and social bottom line. So this has to work together somehow. So how can we make this work? My suggestion is that we need to look at the organizational bottom line of museums, because the way we are organized needs to be different. And I think the COVID-19 is a wake-up call for the sector. What we need is equality between collection management, civil social work in museums and exhibitions. Of course, I forgot to write that. We really need to have non-hierarchical organizations. And we need management in large museums, not just small museums, but large museums to thoroughly believe in it, to lead the way, to think of the civil social agenda, which I think is definitely, I will put it up again and emphasize here, I see this as the leading star of museums. We really need that to be the management and the organization to change. We need not to have those hierarchies between collection management, exhibitions, and civil social work. We need those things to come together in projects where they support each other instead of fighting each other in different sectors of museums. And we need to make research and valid data to knowledge share and to communicate this message. And we also need our funding partners, the government, the municipality and the private foundations to look for organizations that work this sustainable way instead of having different sectors in museums fighting because we all have too little finances, so we're all fighting to get the money and the attention in the organization. And we need the civil social agenda not to be a department, but to be integrated. And we need to learn from this and to change our organizations from this learning. Just my final note, or my final comment, is that you could see I had different examples from projects in Tarpolt. We are just mentioning a few of them to give you an impression. We made this amazing project in 2016 where Syrians cooked and Danes brought porcelain they wanted to throw away and they ate from the porcelain. The Syrians made the food and we made this amazing art piece called Waste Time with Anja Franke. This year we showed this amazing art piece made by Arsuzbegel Fiks where 311 woodturners had created this art piece together with him. We made in 2015-16 the monument of stitches where 650 participants from six towns knitted buildings to each other. They were at the first shown at the town square and later put together a Tarpolt. Again, all these art pieces are core pieces in the Tarpolt collection. We came out of my presentation, here it is. And for the celebration of the centenary of the reunification of Denmark, getting south of Denmark back to Denmark. We talked about borders, what are borders? We had 800 people knitting an art piece together with the artist Eben Hoi. This art piece is again a key art piece in the Tarpolt collection. It is a beautiful art piece because the form was done by Eben Hoi. But the participants, they could contribute with their stitch, their subject under the regulations of what kind of thread and what kind of cloth they could embroider on. And I'm very proud to tell you that yesterday we received a mail from the Danish Art Council who has given this art piece a prize as an outstanding art piece created this year. So she won the prize of the Danish Art Council, which we are very proud of. For me, this supports my idea, is that we should as museums reorganize, we need new kinds of management. Many of you who work with the civil and social agenda in museums, you should start considering maybe you should become the new directors. So the directors, we have different kinds of directors in museums, not only directors with an art historian background, but also some directors with a civil social background and of course art historical knowledge. But with this kind of agenda, instead of only having one kind of directors, because the director will of course lead the way and create the organization. So this was the words and my suggestions for the future of museums and thank you for listening. Fascinating. We're getting lots of interested feedback on the chat here, people saying they found that very inspiring. I was wondering what are you going to do with the artwork afterwards? I mean, is it now a part of your collection? Is it important in its own right? I guess that's the question. Well, it is really, really important for us that it was a collaborative project with an art piece. So it has to be an art piece in its own right. And I have to say it's a very long process with the artist. It takes a lot also, they have to be interested in working with the curator discussing how can this be interesting for the participants and how can this become an art piece. But it has to end up as a genuine art piece that goes into our collection. And we do show these art pieces now and then we take them up frequently. We are very proud of them. They are really amazing. The Thingstead project with the woodturners, it's like, you know, I way way couldn't have done it better. So it's like, it's really a very impressive art pieces. Okay, we're getting a lot of comments on the chat saying how inspiring, how interesting. I'm waiting for some questions. So if any of you do have any questions for Karen, please plug them in now. The other thing you mentioned the organizational change that needs to happen, this bottom up idea and the whole new generation of museum directors with different approaches, different ideas. How can that happen? Yes, how can that happen? Well, I think it, there has to be two things, many things happening, but two very important things is that the boards at the museums have to understand this. The funding partners have to understand and ask for it, because if they keep supporting the old fashioned kind of museum, then that is how museums will keep having directors and keep developing. But the other thing is, we need the people working in the field to get the ambition. And I have to admit, for myself, I was the curator of audience development. And I never thought I would be a director. I remember when the approach man asked me, I laughed at it. I said, that's the most stupid thing I ever heard. So it was a very long process for me to understand that maybe this was a good idea. It was a long journey. And it also actually after became director, I had to kind of get get used to this situation. Now I really, after a few years, I really understood I had the keys. I can do the change. I have the possibility to make a totally different kind of museum. So for me, it was a journey. And I think for many of the people participating in this conference, because I understood I asked who are the participants. And I'm a bit curious, are there any directors joining this conference? Are they into this agenda? So that would be a question for me. Are you there? Or is it only the people who work with social and civil subjects in museums? Because then it's very difficult to climb the ladder. But you need to get the ambition and understand that you hold the key for the future museums. And it doesn't mean that you don't make a great museum. Actually, after the COVID-19, when we opened, I think we were one of the only museums with a lot of visitors from the very beginning. When we opened the doors, we had the same amount of visitors as last year. And then we had a boom over the summer because the government made a package where they supported it. All museums had that. But it actually, and then I thought August would be weak, but they kept coming. So this means that you become the museum of your constituency or of your surroundings. We're getting lots of questions coming in now. Let me, they keep on scrolling up and I can't see them all at once. But there's one here from, yes, that was the one. Mary Vasani asks, she says she loves the collaborative art pieces. I wonder though, all of these art forms seem so Western, crocheting, knitting, etc. But you did also mention your Syrian cooking with the porcelain. I guess, what other examples do you have? What other cultures art forms? Is this a question that you would? Yes, that's a very good question. Now Denmark is a very uniform country with very few kind of, it's a very uniform country. So I have looked more into social classes than into a different, necessarily different ethnicities in the country. We had, it was very interesting with the Syrians. And with the embroidery, we tried to include what are called the language schools, because we would really have liked to have some people, some who are refugees and who come from other countries through Denmark, but they did not have the, actually they pulled off because they didn't have the resources to participate in the projects. And then we tried to invite people, but they didn't work. So that was a sad story about how the resources in the public means that it's difficult to work with different groups. I hope that was a question and there was a reply, but we also have to understand. So I look very much into how do we integrate many different social levels at the museum. Let's look at Maria Bruce's question too. What is your experience with the audience to most efficiently reach them by social media and so on? That must have been important with your crocheting. How did you get everyone involved? What was the best? Yeah, well we found that, yeah, we found that Facebook, over the years we have become better and better. And we have over the last years used Facebook to gather people. With the woodturners, the men, they were not using Facebook as much as the women are, apparently, we found. So with the woodturners, it is mainly through emailing and then gathering them together. They want to be present as a person, so we had to gather them in groups in order for them to have conversations. With the crocheting and embroidery, we have had some really large Facebook groups. And I have to say with the crocheting, it was a big surprise to us because it totally exploded. We didn't think it would be that strong, but it became a place where people could share their concerns and their ideas about COVID-19. And we also asked them to share the crocheting and also when they delivered the crocheting, the light bulb, we asked them to share their positive thoughts about what they learned from the lockdown. And they also shared this on the Facebook, where they also shared needles, crocheting needles and yarn. And they started to make light bulb earrings and did all kinds of things, made new communities in this. So that was very strong. And then we used Zoom for our big events because with this I could bring 800 people together. And then I could send them out in crocheting groups. So a person from the Faroe Islands could crochet with three other people from Denmark. So they could sit and do crocheting and talk a bit and then get together. So we could use Zoom for that. Okay. Mikaela Jonne, another question here. What structural organisational changes have you implemented, just as an example? Yes. When I became director, I said I will do it, but we have to tear down the walls inside the house. So the director's office became an office where everybody sit. And I said that I could not have the title Curator in the house because we had of course people working. But we could not have the title because there was so much hierarchy and power in this title. So for many years until a few years ago, we didn't have the title Curator at all. We had only a team structure and people were then collection responsible, audience responsible. That's where the terms. And it took a while for me to create this organisation. And also some people in who had to leave again because maybe they were appointed to be collection responsible, but they wanted to be, they started to make hierarchies. So it has been a very long journey for me to create this group, this team. And some of the problems doing this was, one of the problems was that if you do something really radical different than the outer world, it's difficult for them to understand who you are. So when people were planning for a job, they were like, yes, but I'm collection management, but actually I'm Curator. Because that's what I learned the other museum. So they would install the old hierarchies when they came in. But of course the wonderful people I have now, they understand the idea. But also I found that the people working in the museum until a few years ago, they had difficulty in telling other people what they were doing in the museum. It was this hippie team working a museum. And sometimes our chief of exhibitions, she is above me and directs. And sometimes I direct, so who's responsible for what. But also because it was so difficult for them to tell other people what they work was, we could reintroduce the term Curator, which they had been doing all the time. Because now we had a stabilized. But I have to say it was a long journey. But now it means that during the COVID-19, the team got together and it was like this. And it all changed into fitting into the new situation. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Karen. I think we're going to have to stop there after the break. We're going to hear more about museum, democracy and education. I would suggest to start with Andre Wilkins. Andre, may I ask you just to give your view from the perspective of the European Cultural Foundation to our question. So basically, naturally, as a European Foundation, we look at the whole issue of museums and social responsibility through a European lens. From this perspective, we as a European Cultural Foundation consider museums an essential part of a nascent, but developing European public sphere, a European public space. So museums can and they do create a European experience. They can and they do tell European stories. COVID-19 for us is a reminder of this very important role of museums in Europe, but also of the stimulus and opportunity for new thinking and change. This is not only about COVID, but rather the current situation amplifies other challenges to museums, like the digital challenge, the challenge of the colonial heritage, the challenge of diversity, the challenge of over commercialization over tourism, and the challenge of sustainability and climate change. COVID brought a rather abrupt opportunity to this challenge and to challenge our concept of cultural experience and being creative in finding new ways, even playful ways, with which we provide a safe and stimulating experience, a European experience, and foster European sentiment. But this lens, but the lens of museums and curators is still rather national, also that is also changing. But how we tell the story of Europe through arts, through objects, through senses will have a big implication on Europe's future, and museums have a great opportunity and responsibility here. The Venice Biennale for us is a point in case, it's an example, it is still dominated by rather national and outdated approaches, and COVID-19 has also, like to the whole museum world, created a course, and this course should be used creatively, we believe, not simply by doing more of the same thing, but now let's do it in a digital way, and we saw that this has also some problems, but by revisiting the whole concept. This is why we are working on a concept of a European pavilion, on fact of many European pavilions. And we consider the European pavilion idea as an example of how to deal creatively with this situation, and challenge it into an opportunity for a European public space. So that would be my initial input, and I hope we can discuss further on this, but also the other challenges and opportunities. I very much look at the opportunities side of museums and social responsibility in these times. Andrei, please let's just go on and speak a little bit about this. Let's start with COVID-19. So what is your impression? How did and how are museums coping with this pandemic, with this problem? There were and there are numerous digital offerings. Did you look at something and if so, what was it? What impressed you? What are your experiences? So I think, like, was a lot in the cultural field. There was a lot of resilience and a lot of creativity in dealing with this situation, looking specifically not only at the own institutions, but at the visitors. How can we create a cultural experience in this new context, which is probably not only, and we know that it's not only a question of a few weeks, or maybe two or three months, that it will be with us for some time. And I'm sitting here in Amsterdam. So the museums there have been really at the forefront of reconnecting with visitors and trying to build new programs in the digital field, but not only, because that is not where the museums will be. They will not be just migrate to the digital space. And I know it is very difficult to deal with all the restrictions you have with social distancing, with new high-agument concepts, but they are doing it because, you know, they want to stay open. And I think that's a very valuable approach, even if it is difficult also for the visitor themselves. And I can only encourage everyone, despite the difficulties, to go back to the museums and help the museums to find their new way in these times. And as I mentioned in my introductory remarks, it's not only that you have now time, it's a lot of challenges which the museums had already before are amplified now. And we will have to deal with this too. I mean, the whole debate on Black Lives Matter and decolonization is a big thing. And that will not go away, that will stay with us. And that is a creative challenge. And so I encourage my colleagues to think these challenges together and in a way see it as a creative opportunity. And I know how hard that sometimes sounds when you have to pay the bills and so on. But that is the same for all of us, also in the philanthropic sector. But I hope that will be the legacy of COVID-19, that it has forced us to find new ways and better ways than we had before. Thank you very much, Andrew. We'll continue at this point later. So, Stefan, please, would you give us your impulse? Yes. Well, I don't know whether I should jump into the digitalization question you were just discussing. So, the PWC Foundation has actually started with digitalization of its own projects in 2019. And this year we are actually creating a virtual gallery and a virtual concert hall for pupils, which is our main target group, to be able to practically and participatorily create works of art under the guidance of professionals. So, the COVID-19 crisis has led us to take it as a chance, a chance to enhance the digital possibilities. And I think generally we face five complex divisions of society, which are actually pushing museums forward in the direction of social responsibility. I don't know what you have already discussed, but this is the age-related division. We get between young and old. The digital division between those digital natives and those who are not really keen on digital tools. The social division of society is a gap between rich and poor. And the social-cultural division of society. And, last but not least, the urban-sub-urban division. So, these actually shift the focus also of cultural institutions on target groups to focus on young people, the topic of digitalization, the precarity, the diversity. So, it's not only that our European culture stands in the focus of whole of society. So, museums have the task to get new audiences and new visitors. Yeah, thank you. So, if we want to come back to our questions, once again, foundations and museums. Andrei, also the question to you. What can museums do? What can foundations not do? Right, and what is the appropriate complementary? So, how can we support each other? But what do you, which possibilities do you see for museum, what foundation cannot provide, not deliver? So, Stefan, perhaps. Yeah. Thank you. At first, I would say there are synergies. So, there are not so much a question what the one institution can do and the others cannot. I think, especially in the field of digitalization, there's a lot to be done together. For example, these digital spaces which can be created. I think there has to be a spirit and Dominica, we have talked about it earlier, that foundations and museums are more and more open to collaboration, to participations and to synergies. So, what is what museums, what foundations cannot do? Okay, they usually do not provide collections. They do not have artworks whatsoever. But in the ideal case, they have the money to help museums to get, for example, their virtual halls to digitalize their pieces of art and so on. So that much more people can visit the museum, even if not going there physically, but on a virtual sphere. And the museums mostly lack the money if they are not privately funded by some companies or prominent persons. So, they are relying on some extra funding. And I'm very happy that what has been there in former years that there was some hesitation according or with regards to the collaboration with companies or with company related foundations. So, there was the fear that they would sort of take over and then maybe push forward this collaboration as a sort of marketing thing. I think that this has a bit smoothed down this fear. I think it's not that prominent anymore, but it's still somehow there. And this is what the foundations have to deal with. So, I think it's important that it's a collaboration on the same level, that really both institutions look okay. What do we gain not in a way of profit, but ideally we can really find points to collaborate and to have some ideas. Thank you, Andrei. Yeah, whether it's complimentary or not to what you just said, we will see afterwards. I think actually the museums, they are the ones who make things happen. They are the ones at the forefront. They are what I would describe the public space. They are in the city centers. They are everywhere. These are the players, which I find consider essential, similar actually also to libraries in many ways. So what can foundations do? They can help. They can, for example, help to deal with these new challenges, whether it's digitalization as you said, or whether that's the question of Black Lives Matter decolonization, because that is a process. And as an institution, often kickstarting a new process is difficult and you might want to have a partner with you who can provide money, but not only money, also expertise, networks, collaborations. That's where I see the role of foundations as someone to help in a change process. Thank you. We have, yeah, Stephen. I just wanted to add something to what Andres said. That's true that in many times the people who are working in the museums, they are really very creative and looking for new formats of presenting artwork. But on the other hand, sometimes they can also be a bit, let's say, slow, because they are so most of the time restricted with the funds they have, sometimes it restricts also the mind. Whereas foundations sometimes also have very creative persons working there. So they are developing new formats. And I think the good thing would be to combine these two spirits. And the best case, there is a very creative and dynamic museum meeting a creative and dynamic foundation. And then new projects can be launched. Stephen, perfect. Thank you very much. I have a question for you from Natalia. How we may reach you to check if there may be any support for an innovative museum project? You can reach me via pwc-stiftung, the German word for foundation and dot de. They will find our website. Thank you very much. And also a question for Andre. Do you know North Metall Foundation in Hamburg? They are a great partner for us and offer wonderful support to stimulate change in order to open up and become more relevant museums. So can you tell us something about it? I mean, is it a best case for a corporation? I didn't totally understand. Do you talk about a specific case in Hamburg? Yes, about the North Metall, which was mentioned here right now. I mean, we are as a foundation all into corporations with others. We cooperate a lot with foundations in Italy at the moment, but also with Dutch foundation, German foundations. So if there is a great idea is a great project, but we look at it, as I said in the beginning, through a European lens. And there is a big opportunity, but there's also a big challenge, especially now where, you know, borders are closed. Travel is restricted in many ways. What used to be a very vibrant cultural exchange at the moment is reduced to the max in that sense. So how to restart this? This is not easy. And whoever has a great idea and wants to work with us on restarting a European public space through the museum landscape, please come to us and help us. And we are very willing and open to work on that. And as I mentioned this idea, we're developing with many curators and museums and partners, also foundation partners of a European pavilion. That is for us a contribution to this kickstarting or reviving a European public sphere, so a new kind of model. Thank you. So, before, well, preparing this conference sessions, we talked a lot about the work of museums and what is necessary to involve people. And we had the term of the participation, right, Stefan, we talked a lot about it. So participation is a very, very important point of us. And I have a question which fits right well. No, it disappeared. Oh, yes, here it is. So from York, UK, we have a very contemporary sector to and the university and the hub of gaming design. What do speakers think about museums and development of gaming technologies? So I mean, there are meanwhile a lot of museums dealing with gaming with games, establishing or preparing games for their visitors, for children, but also for adults. The ZKM, for example, is collecting games since 1989. So for a very long time right now. So the games are a part of our culture. How do you see this point? Well, I think for us that is a new field. We are still, let's say in the traditional field that young visitors of museums create catalogs, virtual catalogs or virtual guidance to us in the respective museums. So the combination with gaming is, I think, very interesting, but we have not had it so far. So it would be up to the precise projects which may be confronting us to see more about it. I think there are fascinating possibilities, but from our side have not yet any experience with gaming and museums. It's a bit similar with us. We are in a way open. We don't restrict to any particular art form in a way. We hope to create a European sentiment, a European sense of belonging. So whatever works and of course whatever works in order to reach diverse audiences, diverse visitor groups. And there is a problem which Stefan has started to address also in the generational way of working with museums. So, you know, gaming, pop culture in general are very interesting and important areas. We don't have ourselves, also we want to. We don't have so much experience, maybe we are not considered a partner in this. We have tried to go into this area of pop culture. It's not so easy, but I think it's important also in the context of how do you reach audiences which are currently not reached. It's a question of accessibility of museum. It's not accessibility, but accessibility in the kind of exhibits and concepts you have. And there's a lot of work still to be done, which I think is happening. But when it comes to gaming and pop culture, we haven't had so much experience, but here we are. We are open and we are very interested in it. Stefan, I saw your sign, but I have to add something. Right now we are speaking about the point of audience development. The European Union was one of the first programs who started to support this idea of audience development. So the first programs of the European Union were driven by content. So museums could just apply for an exhibition, for the support of an exhibition. And some years ago the EU started to give the possibility also for a department of marketing just to suggest a concept how to address the public. So how to try to gain new audience. We, for example, had a wonderful project called Smart Places for four years right now, where eight museums from all over the Europe just focus on the point how can we get people into the museums. And there was also a point of gaming included. So it's really a very important point for us. Just the gamification aspect. Stefan. Thank you. I wanted to stress that our foundation focuses on the practical input from, for example, young people. So I just came to my mind one project which we had that they were creating actually robots, which were making music. So there is a gaming approach if you like, because especially little kids or also older kids and sometimes even old white men are interested in robots and this kind of techniques. And the collection of these robots from this project is currently shown at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. So it's very interesting that this project with little children is now has now found its way to a museum. And this gaming approach is that the kids really have fun, you know, doing something aesthetically creatively created themselves. And this is what we would be like to promote. Wonderful. Yeah. I just to add something to the game culture. I've seen Catherine Catherine giving me a sign if we are over time because of the new schedule. And just to add something to the games culture. I mean, Andrea, you talk about games and pop culture. Meanwhile, there are a lot of games, which are very critical, which are very critical, which are very political. Well, it's not the main production right now, not the consumer side of the gaming. But I just invite you to the ZKM to visit our exhibition gameplay. So there you have a huge variety of really a lot of aspects of gaming today right now. And I think this is a very, very important point for culture. For our next panel, we're going to Italy. This one's on community involvement. The panel is led by Margarita Sani, who is in charge of international museum projects at the Institute of Cultural Heritage in the Italian region of Emilia Romagna. She's designed and managed many EU funded projects in the fields of museum education, lifelong learning, and intercultural dialogue. She's been on the executive board of Nemo since 2014, has been on the jury of the Children and Museums Award, and since 2019 on the steering committee of European education. She will introduce her two panel members. And here she is. Hello Margarita. Right. Good afternoon then, everyone. Happy to be back. So in this session, we are going to address the topic of community involvement. And just the other day I was speaking to a group of students about museums and communities. And of course, the question came from them. What is a community? What do you mean by community and indeed the word community has many connotations if we look at the current literature on museums. We read that there are source communities or communities of origin and they are the ones from which the collections originate. We have of course the user communities, the visitors to a site or a museum. We have the interpretive communities who are the ones who actively contribute to the interpretation process. And then we have the communities of practice or of interest to those who share skills or ideas, exchange know how, and then very importantly, we have the heritage community, which is defined. The term was coined by the Faro Convention and defined as people who value specific aspects of cultural heritage, which they wish within the framework of public action to sustain and transmit to future generations. All of these communities seem also to merge in another kind of community, which is the virtual or online community. And especially with the web 2.0 and user generated content and the digital participation that museums can elicit from people, these communities seem to sort of like take them all. So, very interesting, interestingly, the mention of place or territory is not, does not appear in the heritage community definition of the Faro Convention, and also of course there's no definition in terms of space in the virtual community. So the association between community and geography and locations seem to have disappeared. What does it mean? Why am I saying this? Because when we were talking about community involvement, the first question is, which communities are we talking about? And of course, why leaving it to each museum to define its own community or its own target groups, which could be many and not necessarily in the neighborhood. I would like to introduce the speakers of this afternoon that will help me explore the subject. And first of all, Sara Briganti from Portugal, who is deputy commissioner of the National Arts Plan and member of the project group museums in the future commissioned by the Portuguese government. You should know that the government in Portugal has commissioned a very important study, a national report, which was completed not too long ago, and which identifies the priorities and the actions for the next 10 years. So it's a 10 year plan, which also includes many, many indications as far as working with communities. Sara was also director of the Museum of Money of the Bank of Portugal, and previously also worked as cultural and education programmer and as advisor for art museums, exhibitions, centers, theaters, and various institutions. So I would now give the floor to you, Sara, thinking that you are for the moment the only other person on the panel. Hello everyone. Thanks a lot for inviting me to this NIMO conference. I'm really glad to be here debating such an important theme. Thank you, Margarita, for your presentation. And my question, right? And my question is coming now that I know that it's just me and you for the moment. So the first question is, why do you think it is important for museums to work closely with communities? And how can this be done? I'm sure that what strategies should be put into place and I'm sure you've explored this with your working group on the future of museums in Portugal. Thank you. So I will just start to say that this project group for the future of museums in Portugal aimed at identifying factors of change that could have an impact on museums and monuments in Portugal by 2030. This report focused on a dual perspective analysis and strategy and incorporated different voices which complemented each other with the data collected. The result is a report with 50 recommendations that are organized into five thematic axes, like museum management, networks and partnerships, digital transformation, collection management, audience development and mediation. And to go specifically on the theme of community involvement, I can sum up some of these recommendations like helping museums and compromises and action plans that will promote social impact. Or to enlarge and diverse opening hours of museums in order to ensure their adaptations to audience profiles, location and seasonality. Or very important recommendations towards the link between culture and the Ministry of Education in order to emphasize the value of museums heritage arts as active components of the school mandatory curriculum. Making available digital resources for all educators and teachers and so on. So, we'll serve as a strategic roadmap towards the future and we will address them and this topic closely in the Lisbon conference next year. But to go briefly into the questions posed, why is it important for museums to work closely with the communities they serve? I wish to underline that something that has been previously said that the work of museums do with communities is part of their civil social mission. In each territory, this work is carried out in different ways by different institutions. And this means that if museums fulfill their social role, their impact is evident within the community. Thus, if we look at museums as part of this broad ecosystem of services, essential for the well-being of a community and the functioning of a territory, we realize that social commitment of the museum is crucial to the functioning of the whole. Lately, the pandemic has given high visibility to health services and the way they are organized and respond to people's needs. But it also shows other services like museums that can save us at other levels. In fact, museums that have been able to communicate effectively and take an opportunity to gain the public's attention on digital platforms have also proved to be useful and available and answered the question that must be asked by all bodies serving society. The question is exactly how can I help? The answer to this question was, in many cases, the motto for the creation of a strategy that had to be developed and implemented in the immediate term. To be solutions, museums have to be aware of their presence and give feedback to the needs of people and institutions they work for, in each community and territory, organizing themselves into shared leaderships, networks with local mediators. This has been part of a great movement of change where museums have had to take risks, forget business as usual in order to provide a concrete response at the right time. Museums have to establish priorities while maintaining availability and openness. At a time of crisis with so many challenges, I believe that the relevant response to community involvement is the ability to focus locally, to listen, to trust, decide and finally to act. And by pointing out where it is crucial to intervene professionals and voluntary social cultural mediators will for sure be able to bridge the gap between museums, territories and their communities. The path to this complex task lies beyond empathy, emotional intelligence and creativity. In fact, this needs a major investment in team building and recruiting with comprehensive view of people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. And finally, I would say that museums actions towards community involvement demand to go deep. And by deep, I mean the acronym for diversity, inclusion and participation. And these are actually three directions for a sustainable multidisciplinary approach to community engagement. Right, right. Thank you. I think I can continue with you. I would ask you also, since you have been a museum professional, I mean you have worked in a museum, you were director in a museum. And don't you think that this emphasis on communities, on the audience, on the public changes the nature in a way that museum is trying to stretch itself too far. Is it changing the nature of the museum and also the nature of the profession? So I would ask you this question from the point of view of the professional, because you just mentioned the recruiting, the role of the mediator of the broker, which is indeed what one thinks is crucial when you address communities in an authentic, genuine way, not just doing the rhetoric, but really engaging them. Yeah, well, I think it's for sure a call for change, what is all happening and the times we are living. So I think the big change is actually to put the focus on a people-centered perspective. And this will imply that museums have to take a stand and they need to be more diverse. They need to work more with education and mediation and with programming, calling up different voices in the museum. And by this, they will go beyond words and they will be able to manifest their mission in concrete actions, not rhetoric as you're saying, and projects that will have impact on people's lives. So I definitely agree with you that museums need to put human values and rights at the center of a culture and heritage. Thank you so much, Sarah. And we would now like to welcome Mathias Kruden, who is Director of Democratic Participation at the Council of Europe, which includes Council of Europe activities and programs in the area of education, education for democratic citizenship, youth cooperation and cultural heritage landscape and biodiversity. You're keeping all this together, Mathias, quite a challenge. So you are the best person entitled to tell us why you think that museums should work with communities, which democratic and social community values they should be promoters of. I leave it up to you to develop these. Thank you. Thank you very much, Magirita. Hi, Sarah, and I apologize for the wall. I hope my skills in working on democratic participation are better than my personal skills. Of course, were the reason that I was not being able to also follow your discussion. You already introduced me, mentioned what I'm responsible for, for the sake of full disclosure. I'm also a lawyer. And as much as I'm tempted to give you a lecture about the business of professional museums to a virtual room full of museum professionals, I would restrict myself to say why this is important for the Council of Europe. I think it will be answering the questions you're mentioning about why we think that social responsibility of museums are important from the point of view of the mission of the organizations such as the Council of Europe which was set up to promote democracy, human rights and the rule of law. Two short points because I'm sure we are short of time already. The first one is historical and it's this year we are celebrating the 70th anniversary of European Convention of Human Rights. Now, what is not and the creation of the Court of Human Rights, what is perhaps less known, the first major convention that the Council of Europe created after 1950 and European Convention of Human Rights was European Cultural Convention. And it was European Cultural Convention, which is the basis for cooperation in the areas of education, history, cultural heritage, and so on. And it was the deliberate political decision of the founders of the European project, if you want, because they understood that the European community, Europe as a community of values and institutions will not be able to function without an investment and nurturing and cultivating of an environment through culture, through history, through education. You can see how important role the museums would have in that cultivation of that environment in which European institutions and Europe as a community can prosper. And Europe as a community is, of course, only one of the communities that museums would serve and support. The second point is more contemporary, but it's also an illustration of that importance. What we are seeing in the recent times in Europe and elsewhere, unfortunately, are certain tendencies that I would describe in three ways. First of all, what we can see is we can see an assault on knowledge, on knowledge, on science, on facts. Secondly, we see attempts to manipulate, distort, politicize history. And thirdly, we see attempts to manipulate, even weaponize the notion of culture for political purposes in order to undermine the certain, I would say, civilizational foundations that we have had in Europe as the basis of our coexistence since the Second World War. Again, in response to that tendencies and developments, I think the role of museums, of places of access to knowledge, of access to history, culture, heritage are extremely important. I'm not trying to say that museums in this respect should be some sort of ideological activists, but they certainly, I think, are a very, very important part of our immunity system, of our social immune system against attempts that for political reasons, for reasons that are contrary to the values that we have built Europe upon, we would, we would, we would tolerate and we would be helpless to this kind of developments. I'll stop here because I'm sure I will call it too long. Right. Well, in fact, what you're saying reminds us that there were two very interesting sessions in the morning, both on topics very, very close to what you just said. One, museums must promote democracy what from the Finnish museums and the museum education in political awareness. So this role that you say maybe museum should not indeed it's already been embraced or should not only or maybe they're not the only actors in this field, but they are certainly very important actors which have embraced that challenge already. And, and are doing that. I would like you to ask you with regard to the Faro Convention, which was mentioned at the beginning of the session. The importance it had to bring the notion of heritage community to the fore. If you have from your observatory of the Council of Europe, if you have evidence that this has stimulated cultural heritage organizations to to work more with the with their communities. Well, I think I think we do. And as I said before, when I was talking about Europe is being only one of the communities that that come into into that are relevant in the respect of that this of that discussion today in the relationship between museums and communities. The Faro Convention really was meant to use cultural heritage, including of course museum being an important medium and part of that process as a way to both stimulate and and and motivate the community building around the cultural heritage and secondly, involve democratized governance of cultural heritage through through the participation of the of the community in I think we certainly certainly have evidence of of of both where the cultural heritage, which in the Faro Convention is defined as whatever in a way people consider to be their heritage has led to the has led to the very important positive social, but also economic developments in certain areas where the around the the the notion of culture culture heritage through the principles of the Faro Convention. You've had provided an opportunity for people to to basically to form a community to interact to participate in governance and to draw benefits, as I said, again, social economic and other ones from that so it's clearly clearly something that works very well for the communities the social environment in which this is taking place and for the governance of the cultural heritage as well. And indeed a lot has been researched also from the European Union around the subject of participatory governance of cultural heritage, which is definitely a priority. I would like to remind everyone that there is the report there are two reports one by the MC group and one by the voices of cultural both on the on the subject of participatory governance of cultural heritage. And I would also like in this context to remind another project which in the coming year because one of the one of the comments that came through in the chat Sarah was about whether it is possible to see the national report and the 50 recommendations of your Portuguese report, which will be finished and then completed by the end of the month of October. And right and there will also be a summary in English. I understand it's surely I hope of these 50 recommendations at least. But apart from this, I would also like to point out that there is another ongoing project, which will be completed in a couple of years, in which I guess several of the participants in this conference are involved today. It's called the Moe museum of impact it's led by the Finnish agency for for cultural the museum agency for culture. And which is about testing and measuring the impact the social impact of museums are 11 organizations, and it will be very interesting to see it will develop a common framework indeed to assess the social impact of museums and how much museums are involved with their public and their communities and so on. We in Portugal we absolutely would like to follow this group and research and maybe even take part because this is part of encompassing strategy of the Ministry of Culture and the National Arts plan in order to measure the impact of culture in museums and other cultural institutions, the social impact. I mean. Right, so I think that indeed they when the project is ready with with some at least interim outcomes or reports, they will be shared widely widely. Someone is also asking if there's a link to to this research report I don't know whether by research. I will I will put the link to the report it's now in a premier preliminary stage. So it will be finished in the end of October because we are now receiving the opinions and voices of other members of museums and it's in the public face. And but I can share the link, of course it's in Portuguese. Unfortunately, at this moment we we will send it to through the Google translator and try to make sense. Yeah. Okay. All right. Any other comment Matias that you would like to make someone in the chat said very important that the Faro convention has been mentioned and more than mentioned highlighted in this discussion. Well, I think that I will I will rather stay on and if there will be any questions suggestion I'll be I'll be very very pleased to respond to messages from the audience. I think in this format and the time and with all the technical difficulties I had in the beginning. I think I'll leave it at my initial initial comments not to add to the confusion. All right. Okay. Well, I think that we are on time, even though we've had some problems and delays but if there are no further questions on the chat and I don't see any, I would hand it over to Catherine. Thank you so much Sarah. Thank you Matias and we will keep in touch. All of us. Goodbye. Welcome back everybody. The next discussion this afternoon is going to look at museums in the perspective of the future of Europe. Let me introduce Julia Pavel, the Secretary General of Nemo. She's a graduate of the Freie Universität here in Berlin, where she's joining us from home. Julia worked in Nemo, Julia worked at the film market for the Berlinala Film Festival and for the German Museums Association. From 2013 to 2017, Julia was member and Vice President of the Executive Committee of Culture Action Europe. Since 2019, she's a member of the EU Commission expert group on cultural heritage. Julia has initiated and led various EU funded cooperation projects, and she's edited several museum related publications. Today she's speaking to Sabina Fahayan, who has been a member of the European Parliament since 2009. Mrs Fahayan currently chairs the Committee on Culture and Education. From 1983 to 1988, she studied architecture at the University in Aachen and she has been a member of the Christian Democratic Union since 1990. From 94 to 2009, she was a member of the Aachen City Council and from 1999 to 2009, she was a Mayor of her hometown Aachen. Once again, we're looking forward to an open discussion and hoping very much that you will all contribute with lots of questions on chat, and Julia will handle those. I hand over to Julia now. So, hello everybody. Very honored to have these next 20 minutes with you, Mrs Fahayan. I have prepared a few questions for you and for our participants. Please do ask questions via the chat. We'll have time after our discussion to talk about everything that you want to know. Mrs Fahayan, you've become the Chair of the Culture and Education Committee of the European Parliament in 2019, but you've been a member of it for a long time. And we, the sector, have an ally in you at EU level for culture. And I'm citing you saying that protection and promotion of European culture as the cult committee's highest priority. That's great. You were also very clear in your statement last year encouraging European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to bring back culture in the title of the portfolio of the then called Commissioner Maria Gabriel. And two months later, the title of the Commissioner had been changed again to Commissioner for Innovation Research Education Culture and Youth. And this is, I think, a very good and promising start of a cooperation between the cult committee and civil society organizations that advocated for the same cause. As a start into this topic, I would like to talk to you about the general role of culture at European level. Although we recently hear more and more that culture is at the core of what brings Europe together. I don't see that very prominently reflected at policy making level nor reflected in the European funding programs. And I would like to know how you feel about the proposal for the next funding programs relevant to culture which are coming up in 2021, especially now looking at all the new challenges that the culture sector is dealing with. I think what is proposed at the moment is absolutely not sufficient also taking into account that we have a situation under the COVID-19 crisis where the cultural and creative sector is really impacted by the crisis in a very crucial way. I think we need to remain vocal about the importance of culture for our societies and not just on European level but also at national level and regional level because culture is of systematic relevance. The money that is proposed now at the moment also that we until now don't have an earmark for the recovery fund for the cultural sector. I think we have to fight there and we have to do more to get the awareness also to the financial ministers and to others that something has to be done because during the crisis we found out how important culture is for our everyday life. I think culture is of systematic relevance that was shown during the last month so literature, art, music, dance, poetry, all these have helped people during the crisis to stand this lockdowns in a better way. So where social contexts have been strictly limited, these possibilities were very crucial for people. People met outside in social distance, everyone on their own balcony, they sang songs, they made music together throughout self-isolation. It has been flourishing, pointing to performers stepping into their creativity to relay health guidelines and share messages of hope. And also many museums were active at that time and made offers for people that had to stay at home and that shows how important culture is for us. It's not a nice to have, it has to do with us as human beings. I can only agree to that. When we're thinking, because we are looking at two different funding programs, the next cycle of programs that is coming up in the course of the multi-annual financial framework in 2021. But we are also looking at the EU Recovery Fund, which I have talked to you yesterday about the CULT committee or some members of the CULT committee have made a pledge which I will come back to later. You might have seen that NIMO has published a study about the impact of COVID-19 on museums in May 2020. And one of the recommendations that we had is a smart investment into museums now. So it's not only about the immediate help for museums to reopen their doors, but it's also about investing into digital infrastructure and capacity building, for example, to support museums in their digital transformation. But we have also seen that crisis resilience does not only mean that you have a crisis plan at hand, but that agile management and flexibility are the basis to handle such a crisis successfully. So I would just like to know what did you demand from the EU Recovery Fund to support the culture sector in the recovery and transformation? Today we will vote on a resolution in the European Parliament, or we had voted on it. I didn't get the result until now. And where we asked for a 2% earmark of the money out of the Recovery Fund, especially to invest this into future proof, into innovative cultural support. The cultural sector and also museums and also other sectors have to invest in digital, they have to develop new methods to reach out to people, especially to younger people. And I think it's very crucial that we help the sector to restart in a sustainable and innovative way, and that is where this money could be spent out of this Recovery Fund. And because we fear in the European Parliament that member states in their programs perhaps will not cover the cultural and creative sector in an adequate way. And I hope that in the negotiations you will be successful in getting this, because the cultural and creative sectors museum is very important also for other sectors, economical sectors. When I take a look to, for example, tourism, 30% of our tourism is cultural tourism, and it doesn't help just to help the restaurants and the hotels and the touristic infrastructure to come up when 30% is also directly linked to culture. We also have to help the cultural heritage places and also museums and festivals, which are thriving the drivers for tourism in special areas that they are supported by these programs too. And how do you think can we support culture or can we as the sector be more sound when it comes to finding those metrics to show how much we are contributing, for example, to cultural tourism, for example, to what we're talking now about, about our social impact? First, I think it is important that we are speaking with one language that we are coming together throughout the different sectors of the CCS. The cultural and creative sector is characterized as a very diverse sector. We have very different approaches when it comes to media, when it comes to film industry, when it comes to music, when it comes to museum, when it comes to other creative parts. Everyone is mainly working on their own problems and their own interests, but when we want to be vocal as a sector, when we want to be vocal also towards the ministries of economy to get really supported and be part of the recovery programs, then we have to speak together, we have to come up together with a position on that. And that is what we try also as cult committee that we give the sector a voice, the whole sector a voice towards those who are deciding on the money that is spent in the end. And I think that we have to be more vocal, not just towards the cultural ministers, but also towards those ministers who are responsible for finance and economy. I know that the sector has sometimes some difficulties to see itself also as an economical power because the value for democracy, the value for our life, everyday's life, for us as human beings, people just can live out of being a cultural being, humanity is culture. And I think what is important is that we also see the aspect of our economical value in the sector. And to show that we have 4.2% of the GDP in Europe is coming out of the cultural and creative sector. Between 7 and 8 million people and mainly young people are employed in the cultural and creative sector. So looking to the future, looking to a recovery, normally we should get 4% of the recovery fund. We are just asking for 2% because we know that when we would get 2% out of this 750 billion, we would get more than we ever got before. We are fighting in the MFF for 2.8 billion in 7 years divided through 27 countries. If we would get 7.5 or 40 billion out of the recovery fund, it would be more than we ever had on European level for cultural projects. And I think one of the main problems is where is the money that we have? We get little money, but this would be a success if we got this share. But how is it invested? And I think when we are talking about strengthening the sector and the sector's voice, as you have just said it, because we have to speak with one voice in order to be heard, we also need these programs to support the sector in coming up with a sound framework for success. So I think this should be part of what those programs should support. It hasn't been part in the past programs while the criteria of being part of an economy, which is totally fine. It's good that we see that culture is streamlined and transversal in every of those sectors. The support to come up with measuring that really reflects what museums or the culture sector in general is still quite lacking. What I would like to know, and this may be a bit very personal, but what I would like to know because you were saying when we were talking yesterday that you had time during the first weeks of the pandemic to serve the internet and look at some of the museum's website online because museums were closed and we all heard of this big museum digital wave that came in all our apartments. So which one did you like very much and why? I visited the Pinnacle take in Munich because I was there many, many years ago. And I just wanted to take a look how it looks like on the internet. I also use also in normal times the Europeana platform because that gives access to different museums and it's a good entrance platform. I also used, was on the Instagram site of the Film Museum where there was a wonderful action where they animated people to be active themselves and make scenes of new movies with themselves to be creative themselves. It's also what the Getty Museum with its challenge did in this context. It was also amazing the Getty Museum challenge similar to the film, Deutsche Film Museum made this kind of active activities where the people could be creative themselves too in linking to the museum or to the movies. And it was really that brought me to laugh and the fun they had the people to create themselves the pictures. It was really wonderful to see that how people got themselves creative and that showed to me especially that people need culture and people need these things and that it's not just a nice to have but really essential for our life that we have these creative and cultural sector that we have museums where we can interactively participate in what they have. And it's also important what I took a look also on the internet was to watch our cultural heritage sites. There are so many cultural heritage sites meanwhile online you have online guided tour through different sites and there was such a big chance and possibility during that time to be part of these wonderful activities. Also that the Bolshoi Theatre for example made online dancing venues and it was really very amazing how the cultural sector stepped directly towards this digital approach. Musicians sitting outside making music and filming themselves and streaming that while the internet but what is important that we cannot take this all for granted. We have also to take a look that those who are creators those who the musicians, the writers, the authors of those the performing who is someone who is dealing with performing arts. They have to live out of that what they get and during the corona times. It was very often that it's that people took cultural content for granted. And I think we must step towards a structure where on platforms the cultural sector is also reimbursed in a fair and good manner. When people are visiting entering such digital possibilities use them that also those who are creating and those who have to finance all these get their fair share. I would like to come back to the first bit that you were saying about the museum initiatives. And we noticed that the museum initiatives such as, for example, the one on on Instagram, the museum from home, for example, that these were the most successful initiatives and all of the most successful initiative had one thing in common and that was that it was completely curated by the public. So the museum seized authority. They didn't say this is what you have to do. This is how you have to look at the at our artworks. They said, this is this is what you can do. Please go ahead. And we let you and we let you just do what you want to do. And interestingly, this is a dynamic that has been discussed in the museum for quite a long time already seizing seizing authority and letting the communities participate. This is something that museums are doing and have started to do years ago, but the same the same tendency and the same dynamic happens on a digital level as well. And I think this is something that museums might also want to take into account when when they're organizing their digital activities and offers. It's not about showing something that you think is important is showing something and let the audience decide what's important for them and creating this added value out of this. Yeah. There is a chance also for museums to open up also to their archives. I cannot present, for example, in an art exhibition, all the works I have in a museum. But when you go digital, you have the possibility also to come up with works that are in the archive that are stored somewhere behind that might that seem not to be actual but perhaps for some people it is actual. And I think that this role is the possibility to access cultural works. Yeah. I would like to come back because we only have short time left and I want to save some time for the Q&A with our participants but I would like to come to the challenges for museums because we've been talking a lot about the potential that museums have potential to to support being democratic and being open and being informed and being engaged. What do you see as the biggest challenge for museums, a challenge that prevents them from tapping their potential to connect communities and being a reliable source of information. I think a big challenge is that we have to to start rethinking how we present museums and what the museum is for people. And that's a very important thing we have to do we have to see to look at a museum on the one hand on the cultural heritage side. I think museum has a value also value as such. But we also have to take into account which value it has for the recipients of what we want to show to look at a museum from the from the users from the visitor side. On the other hand, we have to bring people back also physically to the museums, but on the other hand, we have to bring the appetite to go to a museum, perhaps also online, especially when it comes to young people. I see that when when teachers, for example, want to prepare for a museum's visit. It's good to have possibility to have materials beforehand. But this material must reach out to the region. Sometimes there is a lag between what young people want to see and what what's interesting for them. And what we think what we want to show. And I think it's very important to have this interaction and also digitization brings another possibility for this kind of interaction. I very much agree with that. I'm now looking at the chat. I'm sorry, I'm just trying to read as quickly as possible. I'm, I'm, I will read aloud a comment which, which I like by my wonderful colleague Maria, and she says, can we expect citizens to be vocal about culture? Do they value it and how and when will this become something more than a conversation within the family so preaching to the converted I presume. Most people didn't even realize that during the lockdown they turn to culture because of their understanding, which is the understanding that we, the professionals form for them what is culture of what culture is. And I think this is actually a very interesting aspect because I don't know if you've maybe seen this picture which was floating around the internet in the first first weeks of the pandemic which said. Try, try not listening to music, watch films, listening to music, read books during a pandemic in the lockdown and understanding that this is what keeps what kept us alive during the pandemic. How do you think it may be what, what can the, the parliament as you as, as elected representatives of European citizens, what can you do in order to make people understand what the value of this culture is. I think the, the lockdown showed for many people directly that if they cannot go to a concert, if they cannot go to a theater, if they were not allowed to go when I include sports to a football game, or to events they normally wanted to go to all the festivals that were visitors then the lockdown was closed down, cinemas were closed down, and people were missing that when they don't have it, they realize that culture is an important part of their life. But I think we, we have to raise awareness that we have to fight for this. Also, when we want to have the recovery. Why was it easier to go to a restaurant in the lockdown phase, to go to a cinema? Why was it allowed to do this and not to do that? And that showed, there were sectors that were also the politicians were more aware about, and there were parts where there were less. And it had also to be for me, it has to, it has to do with the awareness also of people, if they take it for granted, if it's just there, or if they really reflect on having it or not having it. And I think what we have to do also as parliament, but also every one of us is to raise the awareness for the meaning of culture. Culture is a kind of education, it's social inclusion, it's inspiring also our work. It's calming us when we are upset. It's encouraging us, it gives us impact and also energy. And museums bring also people together and expand our horizons. It teaches about the world and provides moments of peaceful reflection. And all these things, people are not always aware, because they have it. And they just recognize these things when it's not there. And I think what we have to do is to keep this awareness, to make people awake, to wake them up that they have to also to support the cultural sector and support creative people, because their own creativity is also depending on inspiration coming out of the cultural and creative sector and also out of museums. It leads me to the maybe last question, which comes from Margarita Asani, which is, will this be reflected? Will you help to reflect this in the EU strategy 2030, in addition to the green economy? I think that's very interesting, because culture wasn't very prominent in the EU strategy 2020, only in agriculture, if I remember correctly. That's also a kind of culture. So, can we change that for the 2030 strategy? We are fighting for that. The Culture Committee I think is at the moment quite vocal in all these things. We reached the debate on the cultural recovery. We had a report in the last legislative period, where we raised also the cultural aspects when it comes to regional development fund, because also regional development, the cultural sector must be part of the regional development. So, that we clearly wanted to have access also for cultural projects to these kinds of funding to raise the awareness of the meaning for our cultural diversity as one of the basics of our also democracy structure and the European values. When we take a look to the 2030 strategy, yes, there is a big focus on green, but also the cultural and creative sectors can help to green our societies to make an ecological change. We need the cultural sector also for this, and that's the reason why we always say culture must be part of all these programs and not just as a side effect, but must come to the core of European politics, because our European values, our rule of law discussions, our structures of our democracy are also depending on a very lively cultural sector. Culture is reflecting what politics may, culture is reflecting our societies, culture is reflecting also our problems we have, and culture is the best way of European integration. If we just put that to the side, it will not help us to really to come to European identity. We need the culture, the cultural exchange, we need the varieties, we have the diversities in culture, and that is why we fight very clear as European parliament, especially the cult committee to have a stronger position for culture. We were absolutely upset. You always mentioned that at the beginning when we had the new naming for the commissioners and culture didn't take place. It was part of the description of the job, but it was not not named in any way and we couldn't understand that how they did it just for to have easier, easier titles for the commissioners to skip out one of the most important parts. For me, most important parts we have. And this fight was also successful and we will continue with our fight to bring the awareness. Meanwhile, it is always when we discuss about the MFF when we discuss about the future of Europe when we discuss about democracy and rule of law, that media and culture are in the core of the discussion. We have made several special committees, for example, on artificial intelligence, we have a special committee on disinformation and fake news, where also culture is represented where we also have the media sector represented where we have people from the cult committee also being part of these committees and that shows already that parliament has understood that culture is core and that's not a niche but a horizontal issue that has its place in all policies we are making on the European level. But I hope that also the council understands that and the member states themselves don't see culture just as this nice to have issue but really as a core for our democracies in our societies for social inclusion for education, but also as a value in as such. Mr. Heim, thank you very much for your encouraging words. I think all of us know that we really have an ally and a fighter for our cause and culture in general. So thank you very much for your time. Thank you everybody out there for your time and I think I know that some of the questions have not been answered but maybe we'll have the time to kind of group them and give an answer later on. Thank you very much everybody. Thank you also from my side. And you can always write on my email address your questions and we will answer that. Thank you very much to Julia Pargel and Sabine Faheien for that very good summary and conversation about what the future of culture is within Europe and also for giving us the latest from the European parliament today. So to sum up, you'll have to accuse me here. I've got some very messy notes in front of me, but I'm going to try and summarize a little bit all the things that we have discussed today and we've heard today. One of the main points that comes across is that during the pandemic everyone has realized more than ever how important museums are and how important culture and the arts are. There's also a feeling that museums over many years are becoming more and more people centred and also that their tasks and the expectations of museums have grown exponentially. That raised lots of questions about priorities. Karen Gron asked whether the bottom line as in the financial bottom line should really be the bottom line for museums. At the same time, I found what Sabine Faheien said extremely important and extremely interesting that museums should be a lot more emphatic about their contribution to the economy. So they should definitely make very clear that they they have they make a massive contribution to GDP and that this is something they are perhaps not very stating very loudly very clearly and in a coordinated way. Something that needs to be worked on perhaps something that should be thought about within this forum and future. Another thing that I came back to I wondered whether perhaps we had left out one area of social responsibility hearing about how Denmark had helped people with stress and got everyone sharing crochet hooks and wool. This whole idea of dealing with stress and pandemic and how museums can could could help with that with stress release. Should we care? Is this something we should think about too? On a more on another very dark subject, let's say, we had from the Council of Europe about how there is a universal certainly within Europe we are experiencing an assault on knowledge science. In fact, there are attempts to manipulate and distort history to weaponize culture. And this has made access to museums more and more important. We don't need to be museums do not need to be ideological activists, but they are part of the immunity. And that I think is very important. They are part of what creates a sense of community what creates a common understanding of our cultures and our civilization. And on that note as well, we come to the issue of political education and how how museums can contribute to educating the young in political education. How to counter fake news and conspiracy theories is one area that's being looked at here in Berlin and a very interesting and important pilot project. So, I'm sure that I have left lots and lots of things out there. But there was also lots and lots to think about lots more issues that I'm sure that we will come back to in future. Oh, the other thing that perhaps ought to mention that was also extremely interesting in Finland, the idea of promoting democracy has entered the law. And this is a very radical thing. First time anyone has done that. So that museum should promote democracy is now law in Finland. And that puts an additional pressure adding to the tasks that we have already talked about. So adding also to the economic pressures that we have already talked about, talked about, but also adding to the economic clout that museums should and could wield. I'm going to leave it there. And I'm going to hand over to David who is joining us now to talk about the rest of this series. And he will be talking to two colleagues, one from Portugal, one from Slovenia about the, the, the conferences to come in this series on museums and social responsibility. So I'll hand over to David now. Thank you. Through the right time. With Clara about the takeaways of the days of this day before we come to the content of the next conferences. Just a question, another question Clara. You had an experience with with a networking function today. Yes, I succeeded in one of the coffee breaks. I was also very interested in experiencing it and seeing how it works. And it was really nice. I met a colleague from Poland from Nemoż, an institution I visited a few years ago. We were in, we will be in touch, of course, for the organization and dissemination of our next conference. It was a very nice experience. And I also enjoyed the participation in the meet the speaker at the speakers lounge and had a very nice experience talking to Karen from, from Denmark. So, but just to finish my, my, my answer about the issues and the topics. I think that the beginning of this day was very well completed. And we had a very interesting bridge with this last intervention that I so much appreciated. And I think we are very, all very hopeful about the, the role that culture and of course museums will play in the recovery plan for the next 10 years. So it was really very interesting. I, my takeaway would be that how raise awareness of the value of museums for our audiences. This would be one of the main challenges for the conference in Lisbon. Thank you Clara. Andra, just before we speak about the subject of the conference, you are going to organize just some, some thought or shortly, could you, could you tell us what are your takeaways from today? First of all, thank you to all the organizers in Berlin. It was very nice, although I have to say that there has been a lot of happening around me today. And my son just finished his final exams. It was very crazy. And, but my takeaway was that we should definitely talk about this topic again and thank God that we are meeting again. I hope in Portugal, not just online. And I hope in Slovenia, not just online. So Clara mentioned the awareness of the importance of the museums and that is something that we will definitely have to talk about again. I think that COVID-19 just opened up new questions and new problems that we have to deal with. So this conference could not come at the better time. And I'm really looking forward to our next two meetings. So the next step of this conference is this evening, we are going to have a drink with the participant, with the speaker. Tomorrow also there we are going to have some webinars. But then next year in April 2020 in Lisbon, if we can meet live, we are going to speak about participation, networking and partnership. Can you give us some more information Clara? Oh, we don't, we, I don't hear you anymore. Sorry. The conference in Lisbon will be the second chapter of the story we want to tell. And the better we want to raise questions. And we think the conference will take place in 8th and 9th April in Lisbon. I hope it will be live. Of course it will depend on the situation on the COVID-19 pandemic. So we will let you know which will be the format and the program of course. We are thinking this conference in Lisbon in three main dimensions. I would say that the first one would be to present the main questions of the conference in Berlin. And to systematize these questions, to summarize them and taking them as the departure points for our conference. The second dimension would be around the topic of education and mediation on the one hand. And on the other hand, museum networks and participation with practical examples on the ground from Portuguese experiences and in comparison with other European ones. And finally, we will have a third topic on visions on the future. Of course it will be a chance to present and discuss this research report that will be concluded this year. Called Museums in the Future as we already know by the presentation of Sara, one of my colleagues of this working group. And as some of the main topics of this project were around networks and partnerships around audience development, digital transition, management organization. We will have the chance to debate some of these recommendations. And of course always in comparison in debate with other experiences. And I hope then we will have the right bridge with a couple of important relevant questions to make the bridge for the conference in Slovenia. September 2021. So we make the bridge to Slovenia. Clara spoke about vision for the future. I think that will be your main topic, Alexandra. Yes, that is true. So it is a bit difficult to talk about what is going to be happening in Slovenia. Because we are going to try and answer the questions that are going to be raised not only here in Berlin today and tomorrow, but also that are going to be raised in Portugal. So we have to wait for that part of the conference as well. We are going to meet in Maribor Slovenia on 23rd and 24th of September 2021. At the time when Slovenia is going to have a presidency of the European Union. What we are going to be thinking about is what awaits us, what awaits the museums in the future. What, whether the museums are going to have to change and in what way they're going to have to change. Who should we partner with during that process? And if the conference in Portugal will raise questions, as Clara said, then I hope that we will find the answers in Maribor. Well, I would add something that it's a pleasure for us to work with you. It's the first time this German-Slovenian-Portuguese work together with Nimo is a real pleasure. And it was and it is very interesting to think about this great question of social responsibility. I think museums are naturally an organization that have a social responsibility. They know that, but it's so good regularly to think about what it means today. We always have to rethink what it means. So it's, I like it very much. Yeah, same here. I like the triangle we made. Yeah. So we... Thank you very much for this insight about this project. Of course, we don't have the program. We don't have exactly the date. We are working on it. Thank you, Alexandra. Thank you, Clara. Thank you, David. Thank you. And now I invite all of you dear participants, if you can, if you want, you can join us for a drink at 6 p.m. So in one hour, I invite you to an online reception. Usually when we meet live, we have a real reception with a cup of something to drink. So we are trying to do that online. So to finish off the first conference day, please, at 6 o'clock, come back. Please grab a drink of your choice. For example, wine. But if you drink wine, you are going to drink responsibly, of course. And you can meet the speakers again and meet together again. And we have a guest at 6 o'clock. It's a winemaker. And she will offer us some insight for a short presentation about winemaking and wine in general. So see you at 6 o'clock. And thank you very much. And back to the Bordeaux Museum, I think, and see you at 6 o'clock. Thank you. Bye. So this is the end of the official part of the conference today. As you've heard, there's an option to have a glass of wine later on at 6 p.m. with a winemaker who will be there to discuss her lovely Moselle wines from the Moselle region of Germany. We hope very much, of course, that you'll participate in the workshops tomorrow. I'll give a quick rundown of the details, but they are also in the programme. There are three workshops at midday. The first is on the impact orientation and impact analysis in the work of museums. And that's Bettina Quartz. The second is how can social inclusion become a crucial part of museum work with Fabian Schneeble. And the third one is on modern technology for the museum audience. And that's with Margozata Zajac of Poland. I think I may have said that wrong. But anyway, so that's the three sessions tomorrow. Also, don't forget to check the expo area. Lots of museums, lots of participants have been putting their projects into the expo area. And we hope very much that you will all look at them. For today, that's it from me here at the Bode Museum in Berlin. Have a great evening.