In this presentation, I examine the positionality of the conservator and problematize the invisibility of her arts from the discourse of media art conservation. Both in archival and conservation theories, post-stewardship approaches to recordkeeping and practical challenges of conserving ephemeral artworks have called on shifting the ontology of documentation from a tool of passive recording to a site of active knowledge production. Despite this ontological shift, the work of documentation is often conceived under methodic terms and oriented towards the artwork at hand, with the subjectivity of the conservator(s) sidelined in the discourse. Synthesizing theoretical insights from various disciplinary traditions of translation studies, performance studies, and archival theory, I look at media art documentation from the point of view of aesthetics, where the subjectivity and creativity of the conservator takes central stage. In particular, I compare the task of the conservator to that of the translator to attend to the labor, ethics, and affective dimensions of care work she performs in the documentation process. I further ask what institutional horizons of conservation care can arise from recognizing the conservator’s agency and documentation craft.

Bio:

Haitian Ma is lecturer of Television and Cross-Media Culture at the University of Amsterdam and member of the Care Ecologies group at the Amsterdam-based artistic research platform ARIAS. She holds an M.A. in Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image from the University of Amsterdam and M.A. in Comparative Literature and Critical translation from the University of Oxford. Her research interest spans across disciplines, from the philosophy of translation, the concept of surrogacy in performance, documentation of time-based media art, to the history of outer space and spaceflight. From 2022 to 2023, She worked on conserving and documenting the archive of The_living (1997-1998), a performance-based net artwork by artist Debra Solomon, included in the current REBOOT exhibition at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam. She is now working with multimedia artist Wineke Gartz in taking care of the Gartz’s living archive of ever-growing documentation.

Reading:

Haitian Ma, “Towards an Aesthetic of Ephemerality: Curating Documentation Footage at the EYE Filmmuseum 2021 Exhibition All about Theatre about Film,” AHM Conference 2022 ‘Witnessing, Memory, and Crisis’ 1 (Jun 2022), 152-9. 

Kate Briggs, This Little Art, Fitzcarrado Editions, 2017, 252-91.

Time: Friday April 5, 2024, 14.30-17.00 hrs. 

Place: University of Amsterdam, Oudemanhuispoort, room 1.18D

If you want to join, please send an email to: Floris Paalman <f.j.j.w.paalman@uva.nl>