Conference Day 1 – PM
Conserving contemporary artworks that may challenge the very notion of art and its materiality, has seen the practice and profession of conservation expand to webs of relationships and infrastructures that have direct impact on the Planet. This conference asks questions about the sustainability of those practices and networks of care. SUSTAINING ART sees conservators, artists, curators, technicians, collectors, researchers and more, coming together to challenge assumptions, examine practices, and imagine equitable futures. Through experience pieces, research talks, panel discussions, workshops, and short films the sustainability of people, practices, and the planet will be pursued in relation to the conservation of contemporary art.
Gabriella Giannachi
Documenting documentation
‘Documenting documentation’ analyses the role of documentation in a range of contexts (e.g.amateur, researcher, artist, conservator) to show that documentation should not be reduced to a canonic practice, set of skills and disciplinary approaches, but rather that it must remain an open and iterative practice, available to all. The paper focuses on a number of works that are by definition complex, participatory and hybrid, to show how documentation not only helps towards building an understanding of a work, identifying the conditions for its future activation, but also help us to engage with the work, and become part of the memory of the work, and, conversely, create future memories of it by expanding the wider ‘network of care’ that maintains the work
alive.
About Gabriella Giannachi
Gabriella Giannachi is Professor in Performance and New Media at the University of Exeter, UK, and Visiting Professor at the University of Turin, Italy. She has published Virtual Theatres (2004); The Politics of New Media Theatre (2007); Performing Nature: Explorations in Ecology and the Arts, ed. with Nigel Stewart (2005); Archive Everything (2016 and, in Italian, 2021); Histories of Performance Documentation, co-edited with Jonah Westerman (2017); Documentation as Art, coedited with Annet Dekker (2022) and Technologies of the Self-Portrait (2022 and, in Italian,
2023).
Nina Quabeck
An Overlooked Experise? Documentation and Art-Handling Artists
When COVID-19 hit in the spring of 2020, the artists behind public-group.net used their skills and creativity to make their projects accessible to a world in lockdown by developing an ingenious virtual 360° walk-through. Familiar with contemporary conservation concerns like the inevitable physical absence of a work following deinstallation because of their art handling experience in various museums, they approached the Kunstsammlung’s conservation department with the idea
to test the tool’s use for documentation purposes.
While the museum was closed to the public during lockdown, artists and conservators joined forces in the experiment of creating a virtual walk-through of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s immersive installation The Dark Pool. As this artwork was due to be dismantled after a period of 10 years of being on view, expanding our documentation toolkit towards the virtual seemed worth exploring, especially in view of the uncertainty when the resources to reinstall it would next be made available.
The virtual walk-through of The Dark Pool resulted not only in an extraordinary re-installation aid for when this time comes but also safeguards it by providing a way to study and experience the work while it is lying dormant in storage. The realisation of this project is a testament to the value of having practicing artists as part of our conservation networks of care.
About Nina Quabeck
Since 2019, Nina Quabeck holds the position of Head of Conservation at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. She worked as paper conservator at the Kunstsammlung from 2003-2015 after completing her training in paper conservation at Camberwell College of Art (2000) and received a PhD in History of Art from the University of Glasgow (2019). As a doctoral researcher within the Horizon 2020 Marie Skłowdoska-Curie ITN New Approaches in the Conservation of Contemporary Art (NACCA), her thesis examined the notion of artist intent in conservation theory and practice.
Rosario Llamas-Pacheco
Death of an Artwork
This presentation analyses contemporary works of art from the point of view of their existence: What is my artwork? Is essence the same as consistency? On the other hand, it addresses the
question of the passage of time in works of art, understanding it as an essential property of the entity. Thus, duration would be the way in which a reality persists in time, a way that cannot be
modified, the concrete internal time of the artwork being a property to be studied. At the same time, it studies the concept of death as an absolute temporal limit, and specifies the different
intervals in the existence of the contemporary work of art.
About Rosario Llamas-Pacheco
Professor / Catedrática de Universidad. Dept. Conservación y Restauración de Bienes Culturales. Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV). Instituto de Restauración del Patrimonio. Rosario
Llamas Pacheco is a specialist in contemporary art conservation. She has published numerous books, book chapters and articles in indexed journals on the subject. She has supervised numerous master’s and doctoral theses. She currently teaches several undergraduate, master’s and doctoral courses. She has been director of the Master’s Degree in Conservation of Cultural
Heritage and of the Doctorate Programme of the same name at the Universitat Politècnica de València. She has been deputy director of the Institute of Heritage Conservation at the same
university. She has directed several competitive research grants in the field of conservation of contemporary art.
Sonia Milewska
What can be thrown away? Reflections on sustainability in media art archives
Damaged, deceased works of art are examined for their remains, materials, artefacts, and storage in the context of long-term preservation. When reducing the research area to media art,
it is critical to emphasize their changeability and variability, as well as the fact that its quickly become obsolete due to rapid technological advancements. During the investigation, it was
determined what happens to the specified broken pieces of media art, whether they are still stored and wasting precious warehouse space; their inventory and legal status, and whether they
are sustainable. Examples of active use of such artefacts-archives will be presented as reasons for and against their preservation. The main subject of research will be the Reincarnation of Media Art exhibition (WRO Art Center in Wroclaw), which will focus on an anarchist perspective on archives, work reuse, and possible preservation liberation.
About Sonia Milewska
Art conservator, media art researcher. A graduate of the Preservation of Cultural Heritage at the Jagiellonian University and the Conservation and Restoration of Works of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, where the subject of her diploma was the project of the restoration of the cybernetic sculpture Senster by E. Ihnatowicz. Currently, as part of the MediaArtsCultures program, she studies issues related to the history and preservation of media
art. She is interested in new technologies, living archives, media art and its conservation.