Between Exhibition Gallery and Storage
International symposium at MUDE on rethinking conservation within museology, with papers, a panel and a hands-on blooming workshop
The MUDE – Museu de Design, Lisbon, announces an International Symposium on Museology and Conservation dedicated to discussing contemporary challenges and emerging perspectives in museography and conservation within the museum context.
Under the theme “Between Exhibition Gallery and Storage. Redesigning museum conservation practices”, the Museum invites conservators, museologists, curators, designers, and other researchers to reflect on how conservation practices are (re)shaped, negotiated, and transformed through the institutional, conceptual and spatial dynamics of the museum.
In what ways can conservation be rethought as part of museological and curatorial discourse and vice versa?
The symposium aims to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue around the material and immaterial dimensions of conservation, exploring its intersections with curatorial strategies, design processes and museum mediation, also considering the challenges facing museums in terms of environmental sustainability.
We welcome academic papers, practical case studies, and research projects addressing the following themes:
• Interrelationships between conservation and curation
• From preventive care to display materiality, risk, and adaptation
• Collaborative practices between conservators, curators and designers
• Conservation narratives and the visibility of their process on display
• Methodological innovation in the conservation of modern and postmodern materials within contemporary collections
• The ethics and aesthetics of conservation in museum storytelling and curatorial discourse
The symposium will include a special panel — InBloom — to present the main outcomes of an interdisciplinary project and foster discussion around blooming, a degradation phenomenon visible as whitish surface deposits that affect both the appearance and display potential of objects. For a limited number of participants, a workshop will also be offered to those wishing to deepen their understanding of blooming in a museum context.
