 Welcome everybody to this press conference. The background might have given it away. You're joining a press conference at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos 2016. The question we are trying to answer with this press conference today is a serious one, even though it's about a very beautiful thing. The question is how can we preserve our cultural heritage? And I'm sure all of you are aware why we're asking this question. We've seen in recent month and read very sad news about what's happening to very important cultural and heritage sites. So it's a timely question to ask. And we're pleased, despite the serious issue that we're joined by a wonderful expert panel on cultural heritage. And without further ado, let me start by introducing our panel to you today. All the way down at the end of the panel, but still the number one, we're joined by Lynette Walworth. She's an artist from Studio Walworth, and she's based in Australia. Next to her, we're joined by Peter Salovey, who's the president of Yale University in the US. Right in the middle of the panel, we are joined by Martin Rote, the director of Victorian Albert Museum in England. And we're also joined by Richard Kourin, who's the acting provost and undersecretary for museums and research for the Smithsonian Institutes in the US. And last but not least, to my immediate left, we're joined by Nico DeSvani, who is leading the forum's engagement in culture, and is responsible for the wonderful cultural program we have put together for this annual meeting. So without further ado, Nico, I'll jump to you. Give us a couple of highlights. Well, what's happening here at the annual meeting, and why is culture such an important issue for a multi-stakeholder platform like the forum? Well, culture and cultural heritage being the topic are critical to the sort of multi-stakeholder engagement that we have at the forum. We try to bring leaders from business, civil society, politics, media, the arts. And I think there's been an understanding from the very beginning of the forum that no conversation really is holistic if it doesn't include a conversation about culture and art. So this has been in the programming for the World Economic Forum for many years. We actually don't talk so much about a cultural program anymore as much as the cultural component or cultural muscle of what is a broader program on geopolitical and other issues. And cultural heritage is not a new topic, and the folks to my left are all experts in the topic, but it's with what's been happening in the last 12 months alone with the destruction of cultural heritage sites, with some of the effects of climate change, with some of the terrorism in places of culture and concert halls and museums. It's, we thought it was appropriate for us to raise the profile, see the interconnectedness between culture and the geopolitical context, and then to sort of, you know, try to be our best as the forum, being that platform for public-private partnerships so that we can bring people here from different horizons, from the public sector, from the private sector, artists, and various folks who are dealing with this issue outside of the distinctions, the academic distinctions of what might be tangible or intangible, but really that are pushing for a cultural progress and cultural change, as the forum can be an important platform to generate those kinds of connections. Thank you, Nico. Richard, over to you. You're, the Smithsonian Institutes, you always have people coming back from the US and saying, oh, these museums are all for free. This is fantastic, but talking about the cost and the very serious cost, what are we losing? What are we losing at the moment? What is the damage to our cultural heritage that we're looking at at the moment? Well, it's coming from a variety of sources, as we've talked about. You have the purposeful destruction of cultural heritage, sites, monuments, and collections, the burning of books for God's sake. But there's also the changes happening because of climate change, where we have various heritage sites and so on around the world being threatened by that acid rain, pollution. In some cases, cultural heritage is very significant because it yields economic benefits. Tourism, many people go. It generates huge economic force within many societies. Sometimes it's too popular when those tourists are actually helping destroy those sites or undermining those sites. I think when we lose cultural heritage, whether it be a site, a collection, a monument, or even intangible cultural heritage like musical traditions or languages being lost at the rate of several dozen a year, we lose part of humanity's cultural DNA. And that DNA is not only something to put in a museum as Martin and I put it in museums and enshrines it, but it's also something that provides kind of the cultural DNA for the future because heritage is really a record of human creativity. And so when you lose that, you lose the ability to use that for cultural industries, for education, for new inspiration and creativity. And when you see purposeful destruction, as we're seeing now in the Middle East, then you see a destruction not only of kind of the economic consequences or the educational consequences, but really the civic consequences, the loss of respect for diversity of human kind, a lack of tolerance, a kind of sense of the world that is very restrictive that I don't think we wanna live in. Thank you. Martin, he mentioned that you're enshrining things in museums, but I'm sure there's more you can do without, well, Richard said it. So, but there's more. I mean, you're not just doing this, but you're also the experts on the subject matter. So is there a silver lining? What can you do without going into too much detail because I know some of these things are sensitive, but what can you do to help preserve the cultural heritage? Yeah, thank you, but just to start with, maybe kind of for a general comment in the beginning, I think it's an extremely difficult topic because in a very certain way, we are raised trying to, we are shocked, always shocked, there's an emotional impact, but at the same time, we're used to iconoclasm. I mean, I used to work in Tristan. I'm now in a city affected by the glitz. You know, we talk always about what happened in other parts of the world. We're still part of our culture and civilization. I think that makes it so complicated. So it's a topic that's very close to us. At the same time, it's a very difficult topic because it's far away. And just on the line what Richard said, I think it's definitely, he's absolutely right. It's a variety of topics from emerging cities, lost of memory, tourism, and much, much more. But it's also not only objects, it's pride, language, and so on, part of the museum's history. For the V&A, and I think that makes it even more complicated, the V&A worked with Syria for at least 160 years. We started to collect in the Middle East immediately when the museum was founded. So how can we stop working with our colleagues in Syria today in those difficult times? How can we stop to work with our colleagues in those difficult times? So we had a conference together with Yale a few months ago, and we asked our colleagues in Syria on Skype, what can we do exactly? And they said, I will never forget that, they said, do your homework. And homework means stop illicit traffic, talk to the deans, talk to lawyers, talk to the Ministry of Defense. So I think it's not only what we can do and what Richard said rightly, on-site, it's also what we can do in our countries, in our societies, and changing or grading awareness. It's a question of education and working with those who are part of it. I mean, we can talk about a lot of things that are happening right now on-site, and I really recommend it. I'm just always a bit worried if we add fact to fact to fact, because that's not enough. We need a kind of overarching solution, and we need definitely guidance and leaders in that field who combine all of us. We need more giant strategies for the future. Thank you. Peter, your predecessor mentioned education. So what can you do at Yale? What are you doing at Yale to raise the awareness for that issue? And is the awareness high enough? Thank you so much for the opportunity to address that question. And of course, I think all of us feel honored that the World Economic Forum is providing a vehicle by which we can talk about these issues. I think in part answer to your question, educating the world's leaders about the importance of preservation of cultural heritage I think is a significant opportunity. We appreciate that opportunity. So let me talk personally a little bit and then talk about my institution just for a couple of minutes. I'm the president of Yale University and I'm a psychologist. And so I'm not out in the field preserving cultural heritage or working on doing research on cultural heritage. But as a psychologist, I understand I think what cultural heritage represents for people. It's a part of their identity. It's a part of their understanding both of themselves but also themselves as a member of a group or culture. And so when that is threatened, whether by civil unrest, deliberate destruction and warfare or climate change or acid rain or other natural destruction, let alone the impact of tourists and others, you're actually at minimum trampling on people's identity. But when it's deliberately destroyed as we've seen by the Taliban or ISIS or what have you, that is a kind of psychological terrorism really that is occurring. So how do we join together and resist this? It's going to take international solutions, not just one-off defenses. Now at Yale, we're really very interested in education and scholarship on these issues. I'm really here representing the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, which is a group on our campus headed by Stefan Simon. And it includes scientists working on the chemistry of the materials that are threatened. It includes people who are actually artists working on preservation projects, whether it's textiles or paintings or sculpture or mosaic or what have you. We have folks from Computer Science working on digitization. How can you preserve through digitization, make available to the world? And of course we have people working on legal issues, public policy issues and the like. Our goal is not just finding and protecting cultural heritage, which is of course important, but also studying and understanding and giving future leaders for all sectors of society throughout the world. That's how we think about our students. Giving those future leaders some understanding of these issues so that they will engage with them long after their students at Yale and when they're the kind of people that are invited by the World Economic Forum to conference every year, 2015. Thank you very much. Lynette, you bring a unique perspective to this panel because you are an artist. The gentlemen are preserving their studying art, you create art. So if you see what's happening to these cultural heritage sites, to these unique parts of our history and cultural history, how do you feel about that and how does that change how you think about your own work? I think about culture from that perspective of the living thing that you need to make bread. The essence that you have to keep alive by tending to it. In those places where something is being destroyed that has been created by an act of imagination. I think what we need to keep alive then is the people who knew that work because they hold it in their memory and people again will make something new from that memory. This work I've brought here has a relationship to atomic testing. There are people in Japan who are handing their stories on as living memory, their experience of Hiroshima. They hand on in form of story to a person who preserves that tale. They spend years and years learning how to speak that story exactly as that person told it. I think when the objects go the objects are just a mirror of what we imagined. If the objects go, we have to keep alive the people who knew them. Preserve their memory in some way. Let them tell that story. We need to. I would think my instinct would be to go and capture the sense from those people of what that object meant so that it remains alive in some form. Not physical form but in spoken word. Thank you very much. Before we open the floor for question the theme of the annual meeting is the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Let's take a quick look at technology. How can technology, the new technologies we have, virtual reality, for example, help preserve cultural heritage? Could that be one way to also add to preserving the sense of that cultural past? Please. This is... God asking me is really a rather difficult... Yes, she would absolutely, yes. No doubt. It's the digital technology. I think it's much, much more. If I start talking, Niko will stop me because I always feel like on a mission and I did it already last year. You know, if you bring... We have this amazing, amazing opportunity, probably the first time that we combine the real and the digital, the authentic piece and the digital conversation about it. You can object, make talk to each other around the globe. So I think that's exactly what we have to do right now. But it's not only 3D printing digital replica. I mean, we saw a lot of great things. We really support... I would say that supporting the aura of the real and I think that we will see a lot of amazing things in the near future. But, I mean, I wouldn't be a museum's person looking, I mean, in the future without going to the past. And if you come to the V&A and you see those amazing replica, the so-called cast cords. It looks a bit like Jurassic Park of Culture. All those objects there. The genetic... The DNA code of culture. Then, you know, it's also... I mean, it's an old idea to preserve culture in that way, but it's absolutely the future, definitely. I think we're talking about experiences. You know, as people come to museums or other places, we are talking about recording how doing, you know, holographic recordings of people's memories where you think about doing it... We're doing it in the United States with leaders of the civil rights movement. Astronauts. I mean, you know, this cultural heritage is not only in the past. It's pretty close to us. And as Martin said, it's near to us. So I think we're looking at better techniques for both documenting and presenting. We're approaching the thing of taking the treasures. Many people get about 30 million people that come to the Smithsonian every year that visit the museums. But now with 3D technology and scanning, we're creating the ability to... you can push a button anywhere in the world and get the Smithsonian's collection and print it out. If you're printing out the space shuttle, you better hit the reduce button before you print it out. So I think these... But to go back, you know, there's also a core because it's not only the technological toys that we love to play with and the prospect is what does that do on the ground to people? And Martin mentioned, for example, having Skype discussions with people in Syria and Iraq who are on the ground locally and because they do have the memory and the knowledge. So we're doing a lot of training in areas where maybe we can't get too physically. We're doing a lot... with monitoring a lot by satellite and social media so we can document and understand the patterns of destruction and endangerment. And there we look for scholars at Yale and other universities to really do long-time studies of these data sets that we're getting that eventually you convert into digital information that we can then understand and be able to predict when things are going to come under threat and struggle whether from human conflict, natural disaster or long-term natural processes. So there's a lot happening and I think a lot of institutions represented here on the panel represent this coming together of many people trying to tackle this in a much bigger and more formal way than we ever had in the past. I think it's interesting when we think of innovation in this world, in this area there is no doubt that there is technological innovation, the kinds of imaging techniques that can be used now much, much more advanced just in the last decade. And that has... much of that has been based on the work of computer scientists in academic settings for example. But you know this is an area where innovation can equally privilege both science and art. It is a place where for example, collections of artifacts and archives are worked on by scholars with a goal to understand these materials and to study them in new ways. Another way, the advances in material science have been huge in this area and are being used every day and we have two laboratories focused on this. But as they're doing that kind of scientific work, scholarly work, they're also interacting with artists themselves, with conservators, with people who actually make this material come alive. And I think at the end of the day you end up with a community of people who care deeply about both the making of art but also the creation of culture. And yes innovation and yes technological tools have changed the nature of the work but there's still a very human collaboration underlying all of this. Thank you Peter. Martin, do you want to react to that? Oh, sorry. Martin always always has a beautiful way with words and I think to say the aura of the real is a wonderful way to describe what technology can do now. This work that the World Economic Forum helped me make has come from a very remote community, very very remote community and the technology is allowing that storyteller within that community to send a story out in terms of the issues around tourism also just around cultural destruction which occurs from people going in and impacting as we all do, you know, our presence changes everything. The ability to the technologies that we have now, virtual reality technologies for example to give a sense of place without being in that place is a gift in terms of cultural heritage I think because it means you can give sense of presence without having to impact the place. Thank you for that. I really like that. I think there's a very difficult dimension and the difficult dimension means yes there is innovation, we need new technology everything but we need also a completely different social approach. Think about all the refugees in Europe now and there are a lot of what we have a lot of education programs for that refugees. I think it's more the other way around I think we have to listen to those refugees there are a lot of skilled artists there are a lot of skilled workers there are people we use to work with in the museum right now. We started to build another network of museums but I hope it will help. Network of design museums, applied art museums meet in Oslo next week just to think about how we can work with refugees but again not as education programs more to bring them in the museum and know from them learn from them expertise, knowledge build another group called SOM security and curators working together in the European scale so what I mean without this I should say that without human relations without a sensitivity for what's going on a political sensitivity, innovation will not help we need both. Very good, thank you Nico our panel has been a bit shy we have a lot of private sector and political sector leaders here if the panelists are too shy to give their wist lists to them what do you think should be the message that we are giving to the CEOs here to the more than 40 heads of state how can they support the work of our panelists we are not shy there is not a very shy group certainly not privately I think the message the forum brings together stakeholders as a platform it's a complex issue it's actually you can look at cultural heritage as a way to organize the world you can look at all of the topics of society through that topic since culture is so formative to who we are how we come together, how we understand our own place in the world the extent to which we can continue to raise awareness not only of the urgency of what's happening but also on a more human level as we are talking for example of the fourth industrial revolution the implications of ever faster interconnectivity what is it that keeps us and makes us human you know the virtual reality is such an interesting tool because it's new and the novelty of it and in the case of Lynette because it's combined with world class storytelling really catches people's attention but it's hard to catch people's attention now and it's hard to get into that place of empathy because of the sort of interconnected society we're in it's twofold both I think for us to come together as a community to see how across sectors we can actually contribute but also to be reminded of the very fundamentals of what culture is and how it frames pretty much every decision that we end up making I mean do you want to have a wish list? Please go ahead, this is a chance a very really very short one I mean it's just part of it I talked to Sabine von Schollem this morning to prepare for the meeting she's about to publish a book in a few months on the challenge the background is law on the challenge for the UN working with countries in crisis I mean what we need for example just in Europe is the kind of we need rules we need rules and even a kind of juristic system that is accepted by all different countries in Europe we need more help for the experts on site definitely and that means the UN supporting us what we also need is a debate a kind of philosophical debate right now it's always how to translate it it's always the human before the cultural object I mean is it really true? I mean if you destroy a culture you destroy human beings so how do we define that in a different way we need support for Denmark nobody's talking about Denmark right now but what does it mean in terms of crime and how do we and last but not least and I think it's an extremely important topic talked to the talking to and working with the ministries of defense what about embedded people from the cultural sectors in military forces I'm definitely a pacifist but I mean at least let's talk about I would add one more which is figuring out ways to reduce demand for looted goods from cultural heritage sites Yale scholars worked for many years at Dura Europas and it's a good example of a site that has been looted and through you know in some ways in an organized way not just through banditry but in a way that's state supported or at least not state discouraged and then you know public policy can be used to make it very difficult to sell these objects and and reduce demand too so you know we mostly emphasize warfare natural disaster climate change but there's also other kinds of deliberate human actions that are threatening these sites as well well we can ask you know corporate leaders and government heads to give more money to fund this actual work and there's a lot of good work and you know intergovernmental agencies like UNESCO are very poor they don't really have money to do the job most cultural agencies in most countries of the world are really impoverished and have nowhere need and I would say for you know the corporate sector and government sector to consider I mean here we have a global economic forum a number of the threats dealing with heritage in the world today come about as a result of globalization whether it be of economic forces and industrialization in places displacement doesn't mean it's all right I mean we know the benefits of globalization but there are consequences and one of the consequences we're seeing is rebelliousness against some of the orders of maybe what people associated with the west and modernity we see displacements of people so I think this is kind of the other side of the coin and this is the side of the coin that pays off maybe with some economic benefits but it pays off mostly in terms of our ability to respect I think the diversity of people and cultures on the planet and so to me there is an investment quality to it if you look what we put into the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders we know about the health consequences we need like culture without borders and we need money to support that we need the organizations to support that we need government agreements to support that and we need really boots on the ground that are trained and working very closely with people in communities who have a ton of knowledge and shut out because they don't have the ability to communicate back so I think there's a lot of people and it's not only having something like or installing something like culture without borders and that's exactly what we do for quite a long time right now working with Doctors Without Borders to learn from their experience because it doesn't make sense to work in different silos it's all the corporations that we need thank you very much I'm mindful of the time I'm scanning the room do we have any questions no the room well I know now that my panel is not shy the room seems to be shy so it's now time to thank my panel thank you very much for sharing your insights this has been fascinating very interesting thank you for watching thank you