Ariana Makau

The Plan is Now: Using Preservation to Prepare for the Future

Art Conservation requires skills that can be learned at college, an internship, or on the job. Having a narrow vision of who is qualified eliminates a wide swath of skilled people who want to
contribute to the world of preservation who may be limited only by lack of opportunity. There are many adept voices and participants from within our communities if we take time to listen, amplify, and elevate. It is no longer acceptable to speak/work/conserve on behalf of the “other” without their involvement– especially when they are ready, willing and available to do so. Examples from Nzilani Glass will demonstrate how conserving old stained glass has led to changes in team members’ approach to their own personal artwork as well as fabrication of new public work by the company.

Engaging artists to consider sustainability as part of their initial
creation is key to the works’ preservation. Not to be overlooked is the sustainability of the artist through self-preservation employing proper health and safety measures during production. Encouraging community involvement through documentation of processes, interaction with (and material understanding of) the art; plus training to maintain the work through passive and active
maintenance all contribute to the longevity of the work and our planet. “

About Ariana Makau

Ariana Makau is President and Principal Conservator of Nzilani Glass Conservation, based in Oakland, California. She holds an MA in Stained Glass Conservation from the V&A/RCA, in
London, England and is Second Vice President and Health & Safety Chair of the Stained Glass Association of America; plus a Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation. Nzilani’s
mission, “Be Safe. Have Fun. Do Excellent Work.” focuses on self-empowerment through information, sharing: processes, health and safety procedures and the importance of preserving
cultural landscapes and the environment. Ariana’s work is most fulfilling when at the intersection of equity, preservation and art.

Flaminia Fortunato & Simnikiwe Buhlungu

Do you care?

As part of a collective institutional effort to support artists during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam allocated a portion of the public program budget to commission
new time-based media artworks. The initiative called “Sketches For the Future”, curated by Karen Archey, encouraged six artists to produce new works in the format of sketches, small impressions about the future. These works became part of the museum’s permanent collection.

Within this framework, artist Simnikiwe Buhlungu created What We Put In the Skafthini (Mixtapenyana), 2021, a sound piece that exists in two forms, as an installation with an audio cassette tape and as a digital sound work. In line with the mixtapenyana series, the artist recorded impressions about the future while walking in Amsterdam. In July 2021, I invited Simnikiwe to the time-based media conservation atelier to look at her work together. It was during an informal morning conversation, neither recorded nor documented, that we shared and talked through our ideas, personal histories and notions of care. We discussed points of convergence between caretaking and caregiving from our different perspectives and cultures, and how our personal histories expanded the practice of transmission of cultural
heritage.

This presentation will be held in the form of a conversation between the artist and myself navigating matters of care, our roles within the ecosystem of knowledge dissemination and how our conversations have mutually informed our practices.

About Flaminia Fortunato

Flaminia Fortunato is a contemporary art conservator based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Currently coordinating the time-based media conservation-restoration team at the Stedelijk
Museum Amsterdam and interested in politics of care, oral history and tech-archeology.

About Simnikiwe Buhlungu

Simnikiwe Buhlungu (1995) is an artist from Johannesburg, South Africa. Interested in knowledge production[s] — how it is produced, by whom and how it is disseminated — Buhlungu locates socio-historical and everyday phenomena by navigating these questions and their inexhaustible potential answers. Through this, she maps points of cognisance, i.e. how do we come to know?, as syncopated and reverberated ecologies. Lately, she has been listening to some maskandi music, thinking about apiaries and scanned publication contributions to Simunye Resource Works, a publishing house that is forever yet-to-exist.