What Could We Learn From Conservation?

The Questions

In the face of accelerating climate change and the development of mechanical civilization, there is an urgent need to examine how we plan to preserve and manage our cultural heritage, knowledge, production practices, ecology, and history. For example, changing sea levels have led to the submergence of historic sites and the discovery of new ancient ruins and artifacts, and the exponential production of information and data due to the development of digital technologies is constantly being debated. In response, the organizers will look to preservation for clues to solving many of the socio-cultural problems that have emerged in recent years. 'The Future of Preservation’ interviews writers and scholars who are trying to preserve culture and knowledge in the three fields of media, culture, and ecology, and explores their work.

Through this, we will explore the unexpected problems caused by the acceleration of materials (data, immaterial, etc.) in the future through the imagination of 'preservation' as a solution.

Question 1

Might we envision a future in which conservation plays a central role at the nexus of intellectual inquiry?

Conservation presents opportunities to reconsider how all of us_not just conservators_participate in and contribute to the relationships between people and things that sustain and keep us.

Question 2

Conservators have long been charged with prioritizing the preservation or stabilization of the material thing, arresting its change and decay, but what if the fundamental nature/culture of the “object” is change and transformation, liveliness, or even outright disappearance? Over the last half century, the reversibility (or at least visibility) of the conservation treatment has been paramount to the professional code of ethics, but what if practices of care and repair should be made intrinsic to the object, altering it essentially and appropriately? Conservators often consider the physical and conceptual “integrity” or “authenticity” of the “original” item when deciding between treatment options, but are such qualities inherent in form and material or in historic contexts of production, or do they rather reside properly in unfolding contexts of use, changing functions or values, or efforts to actively maintain human knowledge, embodied skill, and social practice into the future? Curators and conservators alike frequently speak of the need to respect the intention of the original maker or artist, but what if intentionality and agency are extended beyond the individual human to the social group, to communities of consumption, to the material “thing” itself, and to other-than-human beings (embedding the thing in expansive relational networks?) And what if such agency is extended temporally from the moment of creation both backward and forward in time (embedding the thing in expansive genealogies of knowledge, practice, value, and affiliation)?