Biennale

The most important thing during the three days the whole lab spent down at “La Grande Motte” happened in Paris, where Sophie got a new baby-boy, Arthur. Everything went fine, and all four of them are well, happy and tired. I got a phone call from Sophie on Wednesday, and everyone who participated at the Biennale signed a card for Sophie: funnily I had some greeting cards with me, as I wanted to send one to my cousin Martina in Germany who got a baby girl, Klara Rosa, just two weeks earlier and the second time that both of them have a baby close together.

But also the Biennale was very nice, the weather was beautiful, the place was lovely - thanks a lot to Jean-Michel and Isabelle, who organized it! La Grande Motte is a little town on the Mediterranean, mostly built in the sixties, seventies out of concrete with one purpose: to provide accommodations for holidays with a view on the sea. Tastes in architecture have changed since then, yet it is said that every house has a different ornamentation – a little psychedelic. The place where we stayed was a resort, litlle bungalows within pin trees rather than buildings, that we shared with another group: motorcycle cops, who had a meeting there as well – I wonder what they discussed!

The biennale always serves two purposes. First, every group from Atlas, Administration to Thesis committee gives an overview on its activities the last two years, the prospective and plans for the future, its needs in manpower and resources. Even ample time for discussion in the program doesn’t prevent to generally run largely overtime in the schedule and after three days, a pretty global picture of the lab emerges. The second purpose is to simply to spent some quality time with colleagues, to chat informally about everything that comes up, have a couple of beers together and share worries, hopes and rumors. On the way back in the train we discussed extensively a new idea about how to improve the plans for our new lab location – who knows if this would have come up without the long discussion we had on this issue and being together for a couple of days.

Recently I read about management, that rigorous planning is often counterproductive for a group to be successful, as fortuities and limit accuracy in the description of a given situation will always require plans to be changed. Therefore a group is most successful if its members share a common motivation and react to their best to achieve this common goal. Events like the Biennale certainly increase the coherence in the lab and the motivation for everyone – useless to say that I think that these occasions are very important.

What else? Well, the scientific directors for astroparticle and particle physics from IN2P3, Stavros Katsanevas and Francois Le Diberder visited us, hearing our complains, our worries, hopefully also our achievements and Francois gave a very important talk about the consequences of the CNRS reform on the labs. A lot of questions came up and I appreciated Francois' attempt to give us answers. We had an extraordinary meeting of the scientific council of the lab to decide on priorities for new positions next year. Unfortunately our D0 group didn’t make it to the shortlist, even though I half expected it. HESS is the lucky winner: the group in our lab is having a heavy charge in building a new Telescope for this experiment. It was also the first Biennale for Pascal, our new director, and certainly an important occasion to get to know him better and notice how different his style is. And then La Biennale is also the occasion to take some nice pictures of colleagues, like this one!