What is conservation? About people, objects and words.

Museums and collections are increasingly faced with new demands: Demands to return artworks to their countries of origin are just as much a part of this as questions about the appropriate display of collections. Conservation practices are changing to the extent that experts and stakeholders are jointly selecting the most suitable methods for preserving (im)material culture. In addition, conservation and sustainability have found their way into conservation. Although many museums exhibit artefacts of diverse origins and deal with complex conservation practices on a daily basis, there are still no comprehensive resources on the legacy of conservation, including indigenous approaches worldwide, and the link between conservation and (neo)colonialism.

“The depot is a political place”, Noémie Etienne

In her project Global Conservation: Histories and Theories (GloCo), Noémie Etienne explores the missing histories and theories of the conservation of (im)material culture from the 16th to the 21st century on a global scale. Conservation is understood as a set of cultural and technological practices that serve the preservation and accessibility of art and (im)material culture. The aim is to counterbalance the narratives of Western domination in this field and to write more inclusive and accurate histories. Noémie Etienne considers ways of caring for objects and collections inside and outside of museums, valorising historical and theoretical knowledge and questioning the dichotomy between use and view.

Noémie Etienne is an art historian and Professor of Cultural Heritage at the Faculty Centre for Transdisciplinary Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna. She was previously an SNF Professor at the University of Bern, a Research Institute Postdoctoral Fellow and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University. Her book The Restoration of Paintings: Practices, Discourses, Materiality focussed on the history of the restoration of paintings. It was published in French in 2012 and in English in 2017.

Duration: 90 min.
To participate in the event, all guests need a valid museum ticket (or an annual ticket, a KHMembership or a membership of the Weltmuseum Wien Friends).
Registration online  (limited number of participants)
Meeting point: WMW Forum