Highlights from the ESA-Culture Conference @ Bocconi University, Oct 7-9

Milan: the fashion capital of Italy, if not the world; the home of the Last Supper;  three airports, a cheap public transportation system, the most amazing happy hours on the planet and Bocconi University of Business. It was for this last point that I visited this city recently although I had been most looking forward to the first point. Interestingly, it was the third and fourth points that most impressed me and the second point caused me considerable grief.

If you ever plan to visit Milan, here's a few tips:

• You need to book a visit to the Last Supper two weeks in advance.
• If you have bought a return ticket to Milan via some other airport like Schiperol in Amsterdam like I did, check which airport your return flight is from. I assumed it would be the same one I flew into. I was wrong.
• Don't bother eating in restaurants in the evening, just go to almost any bar between 6.30-9.30, order a drink, and enjoy a sumptuous buffet, as much as you want to eat.
• Enjoy the efficient and cheap, if confusing, public transportation system.

The real reason for my visit, of course, was the ESA-Culture conference. It was a lot larger than the Arts one in September. Too large for me, really. There were too many parallel sessions and often there was one speaker in each one that I wanted to see. On a number of occasions the one I did choose to see cancelled, so I was stuck in a session that did not really interest me. Having said that, the session I presented in was full of interesting people doing interesting research. It was also great to hook up with some fellow SocArts crew (Sigrun Einarsdottir, Pinar Guran and Tia DeNora). Below now are some bullet-pointed highlights:

• Round Table: I Make Art - I'm not sure about some of the topics the organisers chose for these roundtables (which Volker Kirchberg aptly pointed out was actually rectangular), but nevertheless there were some interesting talks. Two of them, Kirchberg and Victoria Alexander, expanded on similar talks given at the Arts conference (see previous post). Anna Lisa Tota gave an interesting  talk on public memory and public art. Stefano Baia Curioni, on the other hand, said some very bizarre things. Methinks he does not like Kirchberg's work very much (and I learned afterwards this feeling is reciprocal). Curioni mentioned something about the golden goose being just a golden chicken or perhaps, at the end of the day, just a colour. He was flamboyant, however, and I didn't nod off during his verbal explosions, not even once. So that's something, I guess...
• Susan Bruning (Southern Methodist) - Gave a legal and cultural perspective on conflicts over plundered artefacts, such as Egyptian treasures housed in the British Museum. She illustrated a number of ways in which such conflicts had been mediated and negotiated. There was little discussion or examination of what the citizens of these places actually thought about these objects, however. 
• Kobe De Keere (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) - Explained his asymmetrical coding of the interlinguistic conflict in Belgium.  His conclusions thus far indicate the the conflict, while not violent, is insurmountable at present due to the language that is used by either side to describe the problems from each position. Hedid mention at the end that good will was needed from both sides in a conflict like this (or like any conflict, really) which made me wonder if this was the spot where music could play a role.
• Yifat Gutman (New School, New York) - Discussed the relative new field of memory activism which essentially involves the utilisation of public spaces to allow narratives to emerge in the truth and reconciliation process. This process involves the fore-fronting of past issues in order to enable a public to see the present through a different lens. This seemed like a similar treatment of memory to my own research which looks at how imagined memories, whether real or now, are believed to be real in the present which influence behaviour in the future. 
• Gal Levy (Open University, Israel) - Discussed the notion of peace education in Israel. Apparently, all schools in Israel partake in peace education but conflict itself is rarely discussed. Levy points out that this paints an idealistic, almost fairy-tale, picture of peace without addressing the causes of a conflict that are readily noticeable. 
• Konstantina Zerva (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona) - Discussed her research on social exchanges via digital music. While I thought the talk about this process of interaction, ownership, copyright and social exchanges was useful and interesting, I couldn't help but think that digital music is not actually exchanged for anything. Unlike physical copying, digital anything is copied with no degradation of quality and can continue to be copied indefinitely in the same manner. It is not that there is a finite limit of the copies available, there is an infinite. When one purchases a download, for example, the person or site or company you bought it from still has it. It has suddenly expanded it's size or exposure but it is not exchanged. 
• Pinar Guran (Exeter) - It was nice to see my colleague, Pinar, presenting here and was a good explanation of how music and memory operates within a diaspora context. Her research on Turkish immigrants in Berlin and their relationship with Arabesque music illustrates succinctly how music one time and place can continue to resonate in a separate community long after that music no longer resonates within the place of origin. 
• Me - I talked about my concept of an ethnographic musician working in peace-building contexts. This essentially is an application of my previously discussed reflexive music-ethnography-conflict transformation model where ethnography-minded musicians from opposing sides of a conflict could work out procedural models to influence their own specific conflict. It seemed to go down well.

I also had the pleasure to meet, or meet again, some very interesting people such as Thomas Eberle (St. Gallen), Vera Zolberg (New School), David Inglis (Aberdeen), Harvey Molotch (New York) and Diana Crane (Pennsylvania).

 Me, David Inglis, Chris Thorpe, Nancy Hanrahan

Next stop: Sarajevo!