How not to run a conference
It was billed as the conference to beat. It ended up the most beat-up conference, one full of disappointments and regrets. The 23rd Triennial Conference of the International Council of Museums in Rio de Janeiro (Icom Rio) was long advertised over the past three years to be a conference where participants could look “forward to discovering and exploring the cultural delights the city, its surroundings and Brazil as a whole have to offer.” And indeed one could do so but only for a steep price!
Make no mistake, the meetings of the 31 international committees under Icom during the conference made Icom Rio extremely informative to museum practitioners, with scores of simultaneous paper presentations where one could “jump” from one session room to the other and come home more informed and more imbued with a sense of mission and purpose.
It was the way the conference was hosted and managed by the Brazil Organizing Committee that made most of the nearly 3,000 delegates go home disappointed.
The venue, Cidade das Artes, which some delegates later derisively called “That hideous building!” proved to be a bad choice. People really thought the conference would be at the historic center of the city. Instead, it was 32 kilometers away. For me, Cidade das Artes, was in fact a very good conference venue if it was built in a tropical locale like Cebu: four or five buildings combined together by a long second floor deck and huge concrete roof. It is an architectural wonder with no straight lines whatsoever, as observed by Anna Bautista, one of three delegates from the University of Sto. Tomas. The huge complex, designed in the International Style, was airy, spacious and very functional. Its ground floor was a view deck of sorts: equally spacious with a lot of reflecting pools, where the exhibition booths from Italy, Japan, China, Taiwan and some museum hardware suppliers were set up. It looked more at home at an airport, covered in glass all over (Cidade was not). And when the temperature went down on the second day to 16 degrees Celsius coupled by winds howling from all directions, delegates dressed for a mild tropical climate were shivering with hair windblown and tangled. Some of the booths on the ground floor were a mess even as the reflecting pool turned tidal.
Worse, the conference center was in the middle of a huge rotunda (imagine Fuente Osmeña 10 times larger with Cidade right in the middle of it) surrounded by an eight-lane highway, cars and buses whizzing past, with no access to the many shopping malls across, making everyone feel imprisoned the whole time.
Worse was yet to come. During the opening ceremonies of the conference, the Icom president Hans-Martin Hindz was at the presidential table on stage in the beautifully designed plenary hall akin to an opera house. Yet he was never given the chance to speak. Brazilians took turns speaking, first the organizing committee head, then the culture minister, and then afterwards they started giving gifts to each other, right in front of all the delegates, thanking themselves for a job well done. The interpreter (everything was in Portuguese) spoke the words “And now we take homage to so-and-so” so many times that I fell asleep. And when this was finally done, the master of ceremonies, of all people in the world, simply said: “Thank you everyone. And now the conference is officially open! There’s coffee and refreshments outside.” In Norway during the 1995 Icom Conference, quipped a Norwegian delegate later, it was no less than Queen Sonja who officially opened the conference.
If this was not bad enough, when lunch was served an hour later, all delegates lined up to only two buffet tables. Imagine over 2,000 people lining up like they were in some soup kitchen. There were no tables and chairs, but a huge art installation was right outside composed of 15 to 20 plyboard tables. When some delegates started putting their plastic plates and plastic utensils on those interlocked tables, they were rudely told this was prohibited. People will never forget that scene: standing around that installation art, plastic plate in hand, quietly eating while those forlorn tables looked so enticing. Such is installation art and the ironies it tends to engender!
Someone apparently scolded the organizing committee (I heard there was much shouting and argument on the first day alone at the Secretariat Room) and so on the second day, the committee finally thought that the best way to feed over 2,000 people was to have as many buffet tables spread all over the conference site. Clearly a eureka moment for them.
Equally worse was when the different international committees went on their merry way on the fourth day of the conference to visit museums and other facilities related to their field of museum practice. I was with the committee on conservation and decided to join one of two tours, going to the national museums 32 kilometers away. Shivering in the cold on the round floor, we all looked for fellow members since no signs were put up, even as we could see buses lining up in the distance. We were all groping for information even as time was running out. I finally took out my notebook and pentel pen and wrote “Icom-CC” while someone else held it up high so that others soon converged near us. Did they not have laser printers and bond paper? The organizing committee should have put up directional signs for all 31 committees.
It was almost 9 o’clock but no one from the buses were coming to us. So, one delegate went to the buses. He came back and told us that the bus drivers were waiting for any of the 31 committee members to come because they too had no idea which committee was going to ride with them. What a disorganized conference.
There are so more horror stories about this conference that made everyone wonder if Rio de Janeiro is ready for the FIFA World Cup next year or the Summer Olympics in 2016.
Let me end with three more observations. Icom Rio boasted of the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema. Well, I’d compare our location to somewhere in Mandaue City while those two beaches are in Carcar. And yet many delegates were billeted there and had to wake up early to be picked by conference buses.
Let me close with the final nail in the coffin. When we arrived at the conference venue on opening day, there was no fanfare. No samba dancing, nothing. We were just whizzed up the escalator directly to the plenary hall. This was apparently a portent of things to come: for the closing party six days later all delegates were required to pay 180 reals or something like US $80 to attend!
The good thing is that University of Santo Tomas (UST) won the bid to host the 2015 conference of the Icom University Museums and Collections Committee (Umac) and Father Isidro Abaño, OP, UST museum director, was voted into the UMac board.
Finally, what saved the conference for me were the beautiful and expansive beaches and the museums of Rio—and of course, the thrill of being right on top of the Corcovado gazing at the 30-meter high Art Deco statue of Christ the Redeemer. Those things are worth remembering about Brazil. The conference hosting? Nah, forget it!
