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#FA2012: The point of view of Edouard Austin (live Orange blog)

Edouard Austin, editor if the live Orange blog, attended the two first days of the Forum d’Avignon.

Edouard Austin, what did you get from the interventions’ content?

The first thing I notices is the standing of the participants. From Rick Cotton, to Eduardo Browne, via Jérôme Clément or Stéphane Richard, all of them are major actors of the cultural world who gave us their analysis, their hopes and fears regarding the future of culture. We are today experiencing a transformation in terms of cultural access and communication and these speakers illustrated with passion the questions related to those changes, but also the reasons to hope. Personally I will remember the intervention of the Chilean conductor Eduardo Browne, who thinks that technology can be a risk because it can make culture superficial, or the intervention of Patrick Zelnik, who insisted on the fact that technology had to serve creation. For me, culture means sharing and contact with other people, and if the social networks and other sharing platforms make those exchanges easier, they reduce the human dimension, which, I think, gives meaning to culture.

If you had to remember one intervention in particular?

In addition to those I already mentioned, the Israeli conductor Itay Talgam captivated me thanks to his charisma, his frankness and the simple way he perceives culture. I also appreciated the sentence used by Stéphane Richard “Culture is a living material which finds its source in the people’s creativity”. In other words, we are culture, that is why it is necessary to pass on to the future generations our knowledge, passions and dreams.

It is always difficult to be absolutely exhaustive and to treat all the aspects of the problem in only one conference. Which question do you think you have been discussed?

I was surprised not to see sports evoked during the Forum d’Avignon. More than ever, sports is an essential part of culture, in terms of entertainment, education and employment. Even if today, sports in France can suffer from a negative image due to the bad behavior of some of the main actors, it remains a wonderful way to foster the emotions, just like cinema, literature and music.

http://live.orange.com/

Twitter: @EdouardAustin