Housed within the studio, the Conservation Lab explores conservation as an expanded and experimental practice.
The Conservation Lab hosts regular reading groups, workshops and hands-on sessions that bring together diverse practitioners to explore new approaches to conservation. Through collective discussion and experimentation, we examine how conservation can respond to contemporary social, political and environmental challenges.
The Lab challenges conventional ideas about conservation by asking fundamental questions: is conservation inherently conservative? How might it provoke new ways of thinking? Drawing on the environmental humanities, photography, art and archival practices, we approach conservation as a dynamic creative endeavour that actively engages with cultural heritage rather than simply preserving it.
Our work intersects with ‘experimental preservation’ and contemporary theoretical frameworks, allowing us to examine conservation’s role in addressing complex historical and ethical questions. Through collaborative practice-based research, we foster deeper connections between objects, their histories and their evolving contexts.
Please get in touch if you’d like to get involved: [email protected]
Sessions
Upcoming
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Fail again. Fail better
Led by Alice Mercier and Jay Davis, a session on failure in photography, art and photographic theory, and the ways failure can be constructive and creative. We read the introduction to Ernst van Alphen’s Failed Images (2018), which offers a different theory of photography through images that might be said to have failed, alongside Susana S. Martins’s essay “Failure as Art and Art History as Failure” (2015) on the difference between bad art and failure in art. Jay also brings in two family collections of photographs, documents and footage that explore his family’s and Hull’s heritage through football and fishing. 6.30pm at Studio 26, Archway Studios.
To join the invitation list, get in touch.
Previous
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An evening of short presentations
The Lab returned for the autumn with an open evening rather than a film or a set text. Lila Maria Casey spoke on the image-making methods used during the Second World War and how that archive footage is presented at historic sites today. Simon then tried out Contains no Sound?, his paper for ESNMA in Porto, which follows on from the 2025 sound sessions by sounding a set of unclassified V&A scans that the museum’s database records as silent. Nothing polished, and discussion throughout.
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Artists’ Archives: Agency, Access, and Radical Possibilities
A guest session led by Ellie Porter on the preservation and care of artists’ archives — both during artists’ lifetimes and after. Drawing on her work with artists and estates in private and institutional settings, Ellie explored the practical and psychological experience of the work, and the more radical possibilities that emerge in unconventional settings, with a focus on creating space for artists, their relatives and communities to have agency in the legacy process.
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Movie Night — La Chimera
A screening of Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera (2023), which drifts between fable and social realism as it follows a melancholic British archaeologist and a band of tombaroli through 1980s Tuscany. Rohrwacher films the acts of excavation with an almost ritualistic attention, opening the questions we so often circle in the Lab: what happens when objects are removed from their contexts, and who has the right to touch, to take, to preserve?
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The Conversation — documentation & ‘over-writing’
Our end-of-year evening: a screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), set against a continuing thread on documentation and ‘over-writing’. We read Jorge Otero-Pailos’s editorial “Echoing: How to Situate the New” — which uses the Grand Central Terminal restoration to think about how documentation actively shapes what it records — alongside a short film on the early days of New York street writing as another way of marking and documenting the built environment.
The film on IMDb → -
Sound, Listening, Conservation and the Infra
The second of the sound sessions, continuing our reading of François Bonnet’s The Order of Sounds and turning to Marcel Duchamp’s interrogation of the ‘infra-thin’, with Erin Manning’s reading of Duchamp’s notes. We paired this with conservation science’s acoustic monitoring — including V&A recordings of the micro-sounds of environmental damage in eighteenth-century French furniture — to ask how we distinguish signal from noise, and what forms of attention become possible when we listen to the material lives of objects.
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Sound, Listening, Conservation and the Archive
The opening session of a strand exploring sound and listening as both a theoretical framework and a practical method for experimental conservation and archival practice. Reading Bonnet’s The Order of Sounds on how sound moves between the ‘sonorous’ and the ‘audible’, we set it alongside conservation science’s use of acoustic monitoring — sensors making the inaudible audible — and the micro-sounds of material stress recorded at the V&A. A discussion- and listening-based evening.
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Dahomey — screening & discussion
The inaugural gathering of the reading/watching group. A screening of Mati Diop’s Dahomey (2023) — which follows the restitution of twenty-six royal treasures from Paris to Benin, and won the Golden Bear at the 2024 Berlinale — paired with Noémie Etienne’s essay “Who cares? Museum conservation between colonial violence and symbolic repair”. A starting point for conversations about how we receive, hold and care for cultural heritage.
Trailer →