The theme of this year’s edition of our Communicating the Art conference is The Art of Placemaking. Alongside our delegates and with the help of our wonderful speakers, we will explore this theme through a series of more than 28 interactive case studies, 8 keynotes and 4 panel discussions.

As we briefly mentioned in our previous newsletter – and as you may have read in the news – the Louvre is about to get its first female director for the first time since its opening in 1793.

At a time of increasing social isolation and inequality, cities need democratic, thriving communal spaces more than ever.

Our heart was beating at the announcement of Laurence des Cars’ appointment as President of the Louvre museum on Tuesday. After being Orsay’s driving force for 4 years, her ambition is to change the Louvre into a "fully contemporary museum open up to the world of today while telling us about the past, giving relevance to the present through the brilliance of the past.

We, at Communicating the arts, have been working to wrap our heads around which cultural organisations have re-opened and where. We have readers (that’s you !) all over the world and stay relevant to the reality of what you are experiencing is paramount to us.

Cultural organizations “are faced with radical uncertainty: they do not know, they cannot know, what they need to know.” This observation was initially made by Haridimos Tsoukas in the 1990s, regarding firms but we can all agree that they apply to our institutions just as much as they did – and still do – private companies.

Good news: We will make the conference happen in Lausanne in September 2021. With the Plateforme 10, the Canton de Vaud and all our Swiss partners we are delighted to announce the final dates of Communicating the Arts in Lausanne: 27-29 September 2021.

“Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step”. Those words uttered by Martin Luther King Jr. whose memory and legacy we honour in this month of January has become our motto for this new year.

“None of us knows what we all know together”, those wise words originally uttered by either Euripides or Lao-Tseu (the internet can’t agree on an answer) truly came to life in our first Roadshow Australia conference.