Friday, November 8, 2024

14:35 - 15:00

Teatro Studio Borgna

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Details

Jenna Shaw, Chris Higgins, Tate, London, United Kingdom In 2024 the Brooks International Fellowship for Collections Management, hosted by Tate and Delfina Foundation, invited a registrar working in exhibitions and collections management to spend six months researching sustainability in collections and touring exhibitions. Looking at how institutions transport, store, and display their collections, we built a research plan considering these factors in the context of sustainability goals. Methods of transit, innovations in packing and crating, opportunities for recycling and reuse, use of couriers, insurance and liability considerations, institutional policies, gallery and storage conditions, and what we can learn from other sectors are all explored through a sustainability lens. As collections managers we are deeply engaged with facilitating relationships between audiences and objects. We are responsible for enabling access to collections while also safeguarding objects for future viewers. In planning exhibitions we want collections care to be closely aligned with the needs of our communities and planet, but in practice there is often a difficulty balancing our environmental sustainability goals and the material impact of the fine art transit, storage and display process. We will discuss the process and challenges of developing practical frameworks and methodologies for investigating sustainability goals from a collections perspective, both within the scope of the fellowship and as a wider professional practice. We will explore the role of practice-led research as a tool for encouraging innovation and engagement among collections practitioners, and consider what we learned through the process. Finally, we will highlight outcomes of the research and share findings and next steps.

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Speaker