Curating Decay in The Living Room

Curating Decay in The Living Room

Caitlin DeSilvey, University of Exeter
Martin Grünfeld, University of Copenhagen


June 10th 2021
h 11.00-13.00
link zoom

The Future Urban Legacy Lab is glad to invite you to the second event of the Preservation and Decay seminar cycle of the Spring Seminar Series 2021.
This series brings together four leading researchers to speak about today’s most experimental approaches in the field of preservation theory, spanning from critical heritage studies, post-preservation, entropy, and non-traditional approaches to material conservation and counterpreservation.

In this seminar, Caitlin DeSilvey and Martin Grünfeld will engage in conversation about the relevance of the concept of ‘curated decay’ for museum and heritage collections. Museum practice has traditionally aimed to protect objects by arresting processes of decay and degradation. In her work, however, DeSilvey has demonstrated that the accommodation of material and metabolic transformation in certain contexts has the potential to generate both cultural and ecological value. Over the past year, a transdisciplinary group of conservators, researchers and artists at the University of Copenhagen’s Medical Museion have taken up DeSilvey’s invitation to engage in ‘care beyond conservation’, with the development of an experimental site for exploring life processes at the museum – The Living Room. In their conversation, DeSilvey and Grünfeld will explore their collaborative research interests and explain how they are investigating and interpreting different ways of hosting life at the museum. Texts by both authors attached.



bios:
Caitlin DeSilvey is Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Exeter, where she is Associate Director for Transdisciplinary Research in the Environment and Sustainability Institute. Her publications include Anticipatory History (2011, Uniformbooks) and Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving (2017, UMP).

Martin Grünfeld is an assistant professor in Metabolic Science in Culture at the NNF Center for Basic Metabolic Research and Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen. His research takes place in the interfaces between philosophy and objects, art and science, conservation and decay, life and death.