Our new anthology, Activating Fluxs, Expanding Conservation, has just been published in a beautiful hardcover from Routledge (eds. Hanna B. Hölling, Aga Wielocha and Josephine Ellis).
This is the first book to address the care and preservation of Fluxus works, reimagining the afterlife of Fluxus by positioning conservation as an evolving, interpretive and generative framework.
Fluxus radically transformed artistic practice by challenging the entrenched preconception that artworks endure, unchanged and confined to a singular physical manifestation. Moving beyond conventional, object-based approaches, this interdisciplinary volume brings together artists, scholars, conservators and curators from diverse cultural and theoretical perspectives to explore how the ephemeral, participatory and intermedial forms of Fluxus demand an expanded vision of conservation—one grounded in activation. By reframing conservation as a critical, decolonial and creative inquiry, Activating Fluxus, Expanding Conservation redefines Fluxus as a living force continually remade through acts of care, interpretation and participation. It ultimately calls for a fundamental shift in how we preserve, interpret and transmit the experimental art practices of the recent past.
Offering fresh ways to engage with the legacy of Fluxus through the intersecting lenses of conservation, art history, performance studies and museology, this book will appeal to academics and students across these fields, as well as to curators and practitioners invested in the futures of contemporary art.
The book includes chapter by Eric Andersen, Bengt af Klintberg, Kit Brooks, Philip Corner, Josephine Ellis, Ken Friedman, Marcus Gossolt, Johannes M. Hedinger, Hannah B Higgins, Maggie Hire, Rasmus Holmboe, Danielle Johnson, Magnus Kaslov, Sally Kawamura, Kate Lewis, Ann Noël, Émilie Parendeau, Patrizio Peterlini, Peter Oleksik, Mieko Shiomi, Inbal Strauss, Ben Vautier, and Aga Wielocha,
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available thanks to the generous support of the Swiss National Science Foundation. To learn about the research project from whihc it stems, and about its editors, follow this link.
Rebecca Schneider’s and my chapter “Pas, encore. Quand notre art se trouve entre nos mains” — beautifully translated by Gauthier Lesturgie — has just appeared in the new French volume Les archives en performance, la performance en archive, edited by Ross Louis and Angola Rodionoff and published by Éditions Hermann, Paris.
We are overjoyed to hold it in our hands. A heartfelt thank you to the editors and everyone involved for bringing this dialogue on performance and archives into new linguistic and cultural territories.
Below we have provided an excerpt from the French publication.
Hanna Hölling : Dans un entretien avec Diana Taylor, il y a quelques années, vous expliquiez que les Performance Studies 2 pouvaient être considérées comme une mise en pratique des idées 3. J’aimerais réfléchir à deux aspects liés à cette prémisse, l’un étant la conservation de la performance, et l’autre, la performance de la conservation. La première, la conservation de la performance, appréhende la performance comme une sorte d’« objet destiné à la conservation ». La seconde, la performance de la conservation, applique l’outil des Performances Studies au dispositif de la conservation. Autrement dit, comment ces notions de conservation de la performance et de conservation en tant que performance pourraient-elles être mises en pratique ?
Rebecca Schneider: Il est très intéressant que vous proposiez la conservation de la performance et la conservation en tant que performance comme deux manières d’envisager la question : comment les arts de la performance, ou tout autre art d’ailleurs, peuvent-ils perdurer ? Vous dites que la « conservation de la perfor-mance » considère les œuvres de performance comme des « objets à conserver ». Il est intéressant pour moi de réfléchir à la performance en tant qu’objet – bien que cela n’ait pas toujours été une perspective habituelle des Performance Studies. Cette approche s’inscrit assurément dans certaines réflexions, notamment dans la tradition Black Radical, comme l’étonnant travail de Fred Moten sur la « résistance de l’objet » dans In the Break : !e Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition 4. Une interrogation qui se pose pour moi quand je pense à la préservation est de savoir si la performance doit être abordée comme un objet afin de pouvoir être préservée ? Cela nous ramène à la question, désormais bien rebattue, qui s’est parfois posée dans le domaine des Performances Studies quant à la pertinence de la préservation, c’est-à-dire de savoir si les archives, la préservation et la performance sont antithé-tiques – mais laissons de côté cette question épineuse ici 5. Interrogeons simplement la performance en tant qu’objet. Si la performance peut être appréhendée comme un objet, de quel type d’objet s’agit-il ? Si je considère le geste comme un objet – tel que le geste de la main pour signifier « bonjour » – est-ce que je le perçois comme étant constitué de matière qui, en tant que telle, cohère à travers le temps ? Nous pourrions dire que cet objet gestuel est la chair et qu’il cohère ou se conserve à travers le temps grâce à la résurgence – la fameuse « itérabilité » de Marcel Mauss 6. Selon cette logique, la chair dans/en tant que performance peut être considérée comme un objet du fait de la répétition de son instanciation matérielle dans et à travers le temps. Sa capacité d’itération, qui correspond à celle de sa réitération, manifeste une sorte d’endurance que nous accordons généralement aux objets à la différence des actions vivantes et incarnées.
Mais il est évident que les corps sont matériels et, à l’instar d’autres objets (comme les marchandises), ont été rendus fongibles et soumis à la déshumanisation (le rapport binaire humain/chose et son histoire raciale constituent un problème particulièrement néfaste qui perpétue les séquelles de l’esclavage, de l’impérialisme et du capitalisme actuels du Plantationocène partout où il va, et rend certains corps plus précaires que d’autres 7). Une chose qui m’intéresse dans l’approche de la performance en tant qu’objet, c’est la question non seulement des différents coûts charnels de la qualité d’objet, mais aussi celle des différentes échelles de temps. Si nous pouvons envisager la performance comme un objet, attribuant à l’itérabilité une sorte de matérialité, et si nous pouvons reconnaître un signe de la main (le mien, le vôtre) comme un objet fait de chair qui se répète et ne se fige pas nécessaire-ment dans un corps souverain mais qui bondit à travers les corps au cours du temps, notre geste commence-t-il à avoir un rapport avec d’autres objets matériels qui cohèrent ou sont reconnaissables comme des objets au sein d’un monde d’objets présents et inscrits dans le temps ? Pour considérer la performance en tant qu’objet, il nous faut probablement recourir à des échelles de temps et à des matériaux itératifs variables. Après tout, l’itérabilité, et l’endurance à travers une sorte de cohérence matérielle, ne concerne-t-elle pas en quelque sorte tous les objets ? Tous les objets, matérialisés, cohèrent et se décomposent et éventuellement se recohèrent à des rythmes temporels différents. Si l’on admet cela, peut-on affirmer que tous les objets, comme mon geste, mais aussi comme un artefact tel que la Vénus de Willendorf, s’engagent sur le terrain de jeu d’apparition/disparition/réapparition qui caractérise la performance ? Peut-être que la question que je me posais était de savoir si tous les objets, dans une certaine mesure, cohèrent selon une logique de performance ? Tous les objets ne relèvent-ils pas de l’art temporel (sans vouloir aucunement dire que tous les objets, et toutes les incarnations, sont les mêmes) ?
Hanna Hölling: Vous avez soulevé des questions extrêmement importantes. À mon avis, reformuler la performance comme « un objet conservable » peut nous aider à la situer au sein d’une longue tradition d’objets qui ont été conservés, sans nécessairement impliquer un statut objectal ou matériel de la performance, ou ce que vous qualifiez ailleurs de détritus de la performance 8 – un amoncellement de matière qui se compose non seulement du fragment soigneusement préservé, mais aussi du dépôt, du sédiment ou des débris involontaires. Mais les spécialistes de l’histoire de la conservation pourraient reconnaître dans l’« objet de la conservation » non seulement la longue tradition de raccommodage et de réparation de biens matériels comme les statues, les tableaux, les fresques et les chaises, mais aussi l’objet de l’analyse scientifique et des études matérielles qui, à la fin du -%-e siècle, ont contribué à faire de la restauration, non plus un artisanat, mais une science quasi exacte. Des développements importants ont eu lieu au –e siècle, au cours duquel les premières théories relatives à la conservation ont été formulées par des spécialistes des sciences humaines tant au sein qu’en dehors de la profession. Aujourd’hui, dans sa pluralité, sa diversité et sa socialité, la conservation est comprise à la fois comme un discours et une pratique socio-technologique qui s’intéresse à la matière temporelle et relationnelle. En tant qu’activité épistémique et de production de connaissances, la conservation positionne l’« objet de la conservation » comme un « objet épistémique », fruit de pratiques matérielles et technologiques qui en assurent la continuité 9. Pour les spécialistes de l’histoire des sciences, les objets épistémiques sont soumis à une évolution continue, marquée par un potentiel indéfini. En tant qu’objet épistémique, l’objet de la conservation a la capacité de se doter continuellement de nouvelles propriétés et de se modifier. Ainsi, ces objets ne peuvent jamais être pleinement eux-mêmes. En effet, les objets sur lesquels la connaissance ne peut être complètement acquise ne sont pas des objets, mais plutôt des processus, ou des performances, qui se développent et changent au fil du temps 10.
Vous avez également évoqué l’idée qu’un objet se cohère ou se répète selon des échelles de temps différentes. On peut penser à un objet comme à une lente performance, et à une performance comme à un objet qui se produit rapidement et qui, comme vous le proposez de manière convaincante, se cohère et se décom-pose à des rythmes divers de résolution/dissolution. La division proposée par Gotthold Ephraim Lessing entre l’art spatial (par exemple, la peinture) et l’art temporel (par exemple, la musique 11) est une fois de plus mise à mal : l’art spatial possède des qualités similaires à l’art temporel, et pourrait être considéré comme lent plutôt que rapide. En outre, une telle conception temporelle nous permet d’identifier la relation active et passive de l’œuvre avec le temps, et les différentes manières dont les médias subissent des changements. Les œuvres d’art liées ac ti-vement au temps, telles que les installations multimédias, les performances et les événements, connaissent des changements plus rapides ; les œuvres plus lentes, telles que la peinture et la sculpture, réagissent au temps de manière passive, ce qui se manifeste par la dégradation, la décomposition et le vieillissement progressifs, mais constants de leurs matériaux physiques. Les objets et les actions apparaissent, encore et encore, comme une modulation et une condensation de la matière qui rayonne/se meut à un rythme variable. Mais j’aimerais que nous réfléchissions davantage à la notion de geste.
Com&Com (Johannes Hedinger and Marcus Gossolt), Baum #7, Weiertal, 2025.
While at the Collegium, I will work on a research project titled Caring for Naturecultures , which reconceptualizes the conservation of art and culture as a practice of care, and places it in dialogue with the preservation of natural environments. Centering on “conservation objects” as natureculture hybrids, the project frames care as an expanded and ethical engagement with more-than-human worlds. The term natureculture signals the mutual co-constitution and entanglement of nature and culture, challenging the Western dichotomy that separates human activity (culture) from the natural world.
Engaging with feminist philosophies and care ethics—which define care as “everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we may live in it as well as possible”—I interrogate the hierarchies, dependencies, and exclusions embedded in conventional understandings of care and conservation. In doing so, my project further unsettles long-standing binaries underpinning conservation discourse: nature/culture, subject/object, practice/theory, and tradition/innovation.
Caring for Naturecultures poses fundamental questions: What is the “thing” we preserve—how, why, and for whom? And what visions of futurity guide conservation and care for naturecultures in the face of impending environmental breakdown?
Drawing inspiration from Bernard Stiegler’s call to “think care-fully,” the project positions care as essential to sustaining life and cultivating coexistence with other beings. Crucially, it reimagines conservation as a critical, care-driven practice.
We are thrilled to announce that the Swiss Research Council will be supporting our new four-year research initiative, Critical Conservation.
Critical Conservation redefines conservation as a critical practice, theorizing it as a discursive, pluricultural, decolonial and epistemic activity shaped by politics, conventions, education, the economy and institutions. Emerging from the critical-reflective developments of recent decades, Critical Conservation seeks to engage with and learn from present-day communities of practice, including traditional knowledge holders, makers, artisans and craftsmen, broadly defined, who have historically been positioned outside the expert domain of professional and scholarly conservation in the West. Through transversal conservation, the project fosters transtemporal dialogue, bringing together separate fields of practice that often operate in the silos of their specialisms. Finally, it explores experimental conservation as a means to envision our discipline’s possible futures.
The idea for this project derived in part from the essay “The Technique of Conservation: On Realms of Theory and Cultures of Practice” (2017) and in part from research and writing on the fringes of current initiatives. I am excited to deepen our expertise and engagement with critical, contemporary approaches to the field, working alongside a dedicated team. The projected start of the initiative is the beginning of 2026.
Here is a glimpse into my recent essay–a contribution to the Lexikon der Lebensmittel als Kunstmaterial [Von Apfel bis Zucker] (Engl. Lexicon of Food as Artistic Material [From Apple to Sugar]), edited by Ina Jessen and Fabiana Senkpiel. Originally published in German by Hatje Cantz Verlag.
An enigma surrounds Flux Mystery Food, which first appeared as canned food presented by the French artist Ben Vautier at the Fluxus Festival in Nice in 1963. A black-and-white documentary photograph captures Vautier consuming the contents of an unlabelled can— a unique and somewhat forgotten event, allegedly followed by him brushing his teeth [Image 1]. Whether appropriated for economic or aesthetic reasons, these unlabelled cans of food offered an intriguing experience. They emphasized gustatory perception, revealing their contents only upon consumption and thereby subverting the dominance of visuality.
The story of Flux Mystery Food can only be reconstructed from a few accounts. According to Hannah B. Higgins, in 1963, Vautier purchased “unlabelled cans of identical size in the grocery store and ate whatever was inside them—whether lychee nuts (as at the first performance), salmon, canned sausages, or sauerkraut.”[1] At Vautier’s request, George Maciunas later labeled them Flux Mystery Food [Image 2], transforming the riddle of canned food into a quintessential example of Fluxus’ multisensory nature.
Rather than being purely visual and perceived from a fixed perspective by a disembodied viewer, Flux Mystery Food demanded an active response from the spectator-recipient—participation, activation, and interpretation of the can’s contents. Today, its “container” also reflects the aesthetics of enclosures, a defining feature of Fluxus’ institutionalization and musealization.
Although not always immediately recognizable as such, the “artefacts” of the 1960s and ‘70s displayed today in vitrines of various collections were rarely conceived as autonomous objects. Rather, like Flux Mystery Food, they were integral parts of completed performances.
In the case of Flux Mystery Food, it is unclear when the act of eating unlabelled cans gave way to a more static presentation. This shift may have resulted from the cans’ incorporation into collections or the reluctance of recipients to consume their aged contents. Because the gustatory and olfactory experiences inherent in food-based art (as seen, for example, in the Nice festival’s event) were no longer guaranteed in later iterations of Flux Mystery Food—partly due to its editioning, which removed the performance from the artist’s control—the work could only conceal what it preserved.
As Ken Friedman observed, “the actual food in a can of Fluxus Mystery Food was a bit like the cat in Schrödinger’s thought experiment. Until the can is closed, the food can be anything. Once the can is opened, it takes on a concrete identity, and it is no longer mystery food.”[2]
The unopened Flux Mystery Food entices imagination and creates an anticipation of what might, indeed, be found inside, and in what condition. Not unsimilar to Piero Manzoni’s notorious Merda del Artista (1961)—the can filled with the artist’s faeces “conserved naturally”—the contents of Flux Mystery Food can only be guessed by a direct examination: touching, shaking, and accessing the can’s weight and the consistency—slight nervousness notwithstanding in the not improbable scenario when the metal enclosure incidentally gives in. The gustatory excitement increases the more one speculates what is hidden and what might unfold.
But the idea of purchasing unlabelled cans by thrifty consumers has been widely practiced inside and outside the artistic circles (see the cartoonist John Kricfalusi’s biographic illustrated accounts[3]). Drawn to processed food, Maciunas himself—committed to a living at economic limits, or even on the brink of financial collapse— used to buy and consume, from discounters’ shelves, large quantities of cans whose labels were missing.
Flux Mystery Food is neither a unique phenomenon amongst the food art generated by Fluxus, nor is it the last mysterious work in Vautier’s oeuvre (Vautier produced a series of mystery works such as, among others, an envelope included in Fluxus I (1964) containing black offset print on blue cardboard and concealing a blue card stating, “NO MYSTERY.”)[4]
In the mission to render the elitism and preciousness of art obsolete, Fluxus artists realized their avant-garde intention to merge art and everyday life in a wide palette of meals and dishes, using food as a medium.[5] Employed with the awareness of the process of consumption, degradation and decay, the canonical “Fluxfoods” include works by John Chicks, Maciunas, Benjamin Patterson, Takako Saito, Daniel Spoerri, Vautier, and Robert Watts. Not exactly food art, but rather a leftover from Maciunas’ avant-garde anti-diet, the collection of food containers from his consumed, often identical, meals in One Year (1973-1974), manifest the way in which the habitual—the ritual act of taking a meal—leaked into the aesthetics.
Not only did Fluxus generate one of the most fascinating food arts in the history of the 20th century avant-garde, but also established eating practices as sociality and conviviality, an occasion on which the wider social circles of Fluxus gathered, talked and celebrated the everyday. Among these events were Alison Knowles’ Identical Lunch(es) and George Maciunas’ themed banquets. Possibly taking inspiration from Spoerri’s extant culinary experiments,[6] these banquets were organized as “monomeals” that utilized either only one ingredient, e.g. eggs or fish, or they were composed of transparent foods or of dishes maintained in one colour.[7] Preceding by decades the relational aesthetics[8] and metabolized, as David Joselit puts it, both in the bodies and in consumer networks, Fluxus food became a post-Duchampian bio-readymade to be consumed in an everyday ritual.[9]
Against the belief that food conservation provides a stable artifact, Flux Mystery Food only apparently might be regarded as docile, fixed and well conserved matter. Whether considered art or culinary culture, the contents of such edible objects, if kept too long in storage, might corrode the can and contaminate their immediate surroundings with their smelly, sticky expulsion. The processes of aging and decay, which are intrinsic factors of all works of art and material culture, impact the way in which the cans interact with their environment. A story has it that a food can from the Fluxus collection at the Getty Research Institute—a can of sardines which necessarily lacked an expiration date— needed to be replaced due to its corroded, ready-to-burst character.[10] An event like this can only be imagined: A work spreading its toxic, aged, and reeking contents over its surroundings (other works!)— a convulsion of degradation, decay and age, and an evidence of conservation’s fallacy in purporting to keep things stable. Here is the programmatic Fluxus outpour—an unstoppable discharge and flux at its best.
From: Hanna B. Hölling. “Fluxus Mystery Food by Ben Vautier.” In Lexikon der Lebensmittel als Kunstmaterial, edited by Fabiana Senkpiel and Ina Jessen, Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2024.
[1] Hanna B Higgins, Fluxus Experience, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
[2] Author’s email correspondence with Ken Friedman, August 21, 2022. Though an argument might be made that the visibility of food does not necessarily reveal its full identity.
[3] Randy Ludacer, “Cans without Labels,” Beach Packing Design, …..
[4] George Maciunas, ed. Fluxus I (New York: Fluxus, 1964). Vautier also endured a 24-hours performance spent in a nailed box that offered yet another variation on the theme of mystery. Rolf Beil, Künstlerküche: Lebensmittel als Kunstmaterial -von Schiele bi Jason Rhoades. Köln: DuMont 2002, 124.
[5] See Hanna B Higgins, “Food, The Raw and the Fluxed,” in Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life, edited by Jacquelyn Bass, 13-21, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press and Hood Musuem of Art, XXX), 13; Natilee Harren, “The Eternal Metabolic Network: Fluxus, Food, and Ecofeminism,” in Living Matter: The Preservation of Biological Materials in Contemporary Art, Proceedings from a Conference Held in Mexico City, June 3-5, 2019, edited by Rachel Rivenc, Kendra Roth. Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2022. https://www.getty.edu/publications/living‑matter/
[6] John Hedricks, “Daniel Speori,” in Ubi Fluxus Ibi Motus, 1990-62, edited by Achille Bonito Oliva (Venezia and Milan: Edizioni Mazotta, 1990),262 translated from French in David Joselit, “The Readymade Metabolized: Fluxus in Life,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 63/64, Wet/Dry (Spring/Autumn 2013):193.
[7] Cecilia Novero, Anti-diets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 241; Higgins, Fluxus Experience, 47.
[8] Coined by art critic, historian and curator Nicolas Bourriaud.
[10] Marcia Reed, „Killing with Kindness? The Challenges of Conservation and Access for Living Matter,” in Living Matter: The Preservation of Biological Materials in Contemporary Art, Proceedings from a Conference Held in Mexico City, June 3-5, 2019, edited by Rachel Rivenc, Kendra Roth. Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2022. https://www.getty.edu/publications/living‑matter/; Albrecht Gumlich,“Hooked (1980) by Ben Patterson,“ Interview with Aga Wielocha and Hanna Hölling, Radio Fluxus, Episode 1, https://activatingfluxus.com/radio-fluxus/. My sincere thanks to Aga Wielocha for drawing my attention to the missing date.
I am pleased to announce that the second and final volume of our series on performance conservation has seen the daylight from Routledge. The book is available Open Access from November 2024 and since a few weeks, also as a hard cover.
Representing the output of the research project “Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge,” this volume brings together diverse voices, methods, and formats in the discussion and practice of performance conservation.
Conservators, artists, curators and scholars explore the ontology of performance art through its creation and institutionalization into an astonishing range of methods and approaches for keeping performance alive and well, whether inside museum collections or through folk traditions. Anchored in the disciplines of contemporary art conservation, art history, and performance studies, the contributions range far beyond these to include perspectives from anthropology, musicology, dance, law, heritage studies, and other fields. While its focus is on performance as understood in the context of contemporary art, the book’s notion of performance is much wider, including other media such as music, theater, and dance as well as an open-ended concept of performance as a vital force across culture(s).
While providing cutting-edge research on an emerging and important topic, this volume remains accessible to all interested readers, allowing it to serve as a singularly valuable resource for museum professionals, scholars, students, and practitioners.
With contributing authors: Amelia Jones, Michaela Schäuble, Thomas Gartmann, Philip Auslander, Puwai Cairns, Black Art Conservators Valinda Carroll, Kayla Henry-Griffin, Nylah Byrd and Ariana Makau, Brandie MacDonald, Sandra Sykora, Rosanna Raymond, Urmimala Sarkar Munsi, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Gisela Hochuli, Joanna Lesnierowska, Ido Feder and the editors, Emilie Magnin, Jules Pelta Feldman and Hanna B. Hölling.
January 27-29, 2025 | Institute of Materiality in Art and Culture | HKB Bern Academy of the Arts
We are calling for participation in this Lab from individuals from the Global South, especially those who belong to underrepresented groups and are in the early phases of their careers (e.g., PhD candidates or recent postdocs). See below for the description and specifics of the call.
This international workshop aims to bring together in a hybrid format experts and practitioners of conservation in two domains: on the one hand, art and cultural heritage conservation; and on the other hand, nature conservation. Except for singular activities, these two communities have rarely if at all communicated. This is highly remarkable especially considering recent developments both in art conservation and nature conservation. In both domains the “things”, “items”, “objects” or “sites” conservators and conservationists care for are increasingly recognized as natureculture hybrids. While art conservation, especially in its earlier guise of restoration, primarily considered artworks as the outcome of human—and especially the artist’s—intentions, the field of art conservation has increasingly recognized that the materials of artworks undergo unintentional, and sometimes unexpected, changes and are subject to loss and decay well outside human control. At the other end, while inspired by ideas of pristine wilderness, nature conservation in its earliest instances was primarily geared towards the establishment of national parks and nature reserves fortified against human intervention, conservationists have come to value humans as inherent to the ecosystems they care for. Given that the “things” and “sites” for which (art) conservators and (nature) conservationists hold responsibility are interplays of human and non-human agencies and thus nature-culture hybrids, both fields and communities consider ontologically similar objects, and should exchange views.
The workshop will explore questions such as, How should conservation practices in both nature and art be redefined in light of the inevitable and sometimes desirable changes to the material make-up of objects, landscapes and environments? How can new conservation theories that embrace change and transformation, particularly those emerging from contemporary art, inform and reshape traditional conservation approaches that prioritize permanence and stability? Who gets to decide where and how conservation occurs, considering the historical silencing and displacement of human voices in both ecological restoration and cultural heritage conservation? How can the field of conservation expand beyond top-down expert models to embrace decolonizing community engagement, thereby raising questions about the future role of experts?
The current global challenges of the climate, environmental and, in parts of the globe, humanitarian crisis create a strong urgency to intensify the exchange between the fields of art and nature conservation. To cope with these challenges, nature and culture heritage conservation requires alternative ontologies and distinct epistemologies. Ontologically, both fields require approaches that can deal with change and the dynamics accelerated by the climate crisis. Epistemologically, both fields need to develop more inclusive models of decision-making, in their turn, questioning the role of experts in conservation. This workshop will bring these two communities together not because we are under the assumption that one field has the solutions to the problems the other field is confronted with, but because both fields confront similar problems. Rather than transferring ready-made solutions from the domain of art and culture to nature, or vice versa, and simply having one community learn from the other, the workshop will offer a platform for both communities to learn together and progress facing the global challenges mentioned above.
The confirmed contributors for this workshop are Lotte Arndt, Jackob Badcock, Marjolijn Bol, Josephine Ellis, Noémie Étienne, Sven Dupré, Rodney Harrison, Hanna B. Hölling, Laura J. Martin, Maeva Pimo, Christian Rosset, Friederike Schäfer, Anna Schäffler, Peter Schneemann, Yvonne Schmidt and Glenn Wharton.
We also invite applications from individuals in the Global South, particularly those from underrepresented groups and at early career stages (PhD candidates or early postdocs), to participate in our workshop. Participants may contribute by delivering a short presentation and/or joining discussion groups focused on the aforementioned themes. A subsidy of CHF 1,000 is available to support travel and accommodation for four in-person participants. The workshop and application process will be conducted in English.
Please apply by November 3, 2024, by submitting the following: 1. A motivation letter (maximum 2 pages) detailing your interest in participating in the workshop and a brief research statement explaining how the workshop would benefit your current research 2. A CV (maximum 5 pages), including a list of publications.
Natureculture Lab has been organized by Hanna B. Hölling (HKB Bern Academy of the Arts) and Sven Dupré (Utrecht University/University van Amsterdam) with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation Scientific Exchanges Grant, the Bern University of Applied Science Network Grant and the Institute Materiality in Art and Culture at HKB Bern Academy of the Arts.
This is a first glimpse into the schedule for a long-awaited research festival and exhibition, “Conserving Performance: Performing Conservation,” which is currently in its final planning phase by the members of the project Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge. The events, which also mark the conclusion of the research project, will take place in venues across Switzerland from September 14 to September 29, 2024.
Please save the dates and join us this fall at Tanzhaus Zürich, ADC Genève, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Muséee cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne/PLATEFORME 10, Dampfzentrale Bern and HKB Bern.
With speakers: Sara Wookey, Megan Metcalf, Peter Pleyer, Catja Loepfe, Declan Whitaker, Florence Jung, Simona Ciuccio, Cori Olighouse, Thomas Plischke, Eszter Salamon, Rachel Mader, Eszter Salamon, Saša Asentić, Nina Mühlemann, Rebecca Gordon, Sabine Gebhardt Fink, Muda Mathis, Andrea Saemann, Dorothea Rust, Chris Regn, Gisela Hochuli, Tabea Lurk, Julia Asperska, Joanna Leśnierowska, Andrej Mirčev, Emilie Magnin and Hanna Hölling.
I am thrilled to have been invited to contribute to this Getty Podcast “Recording the Artists. Intimate Addresses,” on the topic of Nam June Paik and his letter to Tudor, with my fellow speakers Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Anna Deavere and our host and moderator Tess Taylor . Below you may find a brief description of the podcast, its transcript and a link to its online experience.
In the mid-1960s, Nam June Paik is living in a run-down studio in SoHo, struggling to make ends meet. But even as he jokes about his ongoing battle against cockroaches, he is building his network, seeking out support for his artist friends, and always experimenting with form. Paik’s vibrant personality is on full display in a letter from this period to musician David Tudor. Partially typewritten, partially handwritten, and full of wild punctuation and inside jokes, the letter’s main purpose is to help find work for his friend, Japanese musician Takehisa Kosugi.
In this episode of Recording Artists: Intimate Addresses, you’ll meet the wildly charming artist whose theories on technology and our relationship to it remain eerily prescient today; the man who coined the phrase “electronic superhighway” and advocated for artists to be at the vanguard of using the newest tech; and the person who tirelessly looked out for his friends. Host Tess Taylor unpacks some of Paik’s best-known artworks and traces his evolving thinking about art and tech. Anna Deavere Smith reads the letter. Korean American artist Sueyeun Juliette Lee and art historian and conservator Hanna Hölling help you make sense of Paik’s networks—both personal and electronic—and his legacy.
This book focuses on performance and performance-based artworks as seen through the lens of conservation, which has long been overlooked in the larger theoretical debates about whether and how performance remains.
Unraveling the complexities involved in the conservation of performance, Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care (vol. 1) brings this new understanding to bear in examining performance as an object of study, experience, acquisition, and care. In so doing, it presents both theoretical frameworks and functional paradigms for thinking about—and enacting—the conservation of performance. Further, while the conservation of performance is undertheorized, performance is nevertheless increasingly entering the art market and the museum, meaning that there is an urgent need for discourse on how to care for these works long-term. In recent years, a few pioneering conservators, curators, and scholars have begun to create frameworks for the longterm care of performance. This volume presents, explicates, and contextualizes their work so that a larger discourse can commence. It will thus serve the needs of conservation students and professors, for whom literature on this subject is sorely needed.
This interdisciplinary book thus implements a novel rethinking of performance that will challenge and revitalize its conception in many fields, such as art history, theater, performance studies, heritage studies, and anthropology.
Co-edited with Jules Pelta Feldman and Emilie Magnin.
Contributing authors: Pip Laurenson Rebecca Schneider with Hanna B. Hölling Hélia Marçal Gabriella Giannachi Shadreck Chirikure Iona Goldie-Scot Brian Castriota And Claire Walsh Farris Wahbeh Kelli Morgan Kongo Astronauts (Eléonore Hellio with Michel Ekeba) Dread Scott Karolina Wilczynska Cori Olinghouse with Megan Metcalf Erin Brannigan with Louise Lawson Cauleen Smith
The book is available OPEN ACCESS, thanks to the generous support of the Swiss National Science Foundation Book Publication Fund. Access its full version here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003309987/performance-hanna-h%C3%B6lling-jules-pelta-feldman-emilie-magnin.
