Tuning In: Attunement as an Embodied Methodology for Conservation Practices
Lecture by Brian Castriota as part of the lecture series Best Available Copy 4 - the preservation of time-based media art ... documentation as a copy at the Institute for Conservation-Restoration.
Prevailing approaches to conservation remain rooted in a metaphysics of individualism and a Cartesian assumption that the objects of conservation practices have determinate boundaries and properties that precede our inquiry. Thinking with agential realism and Indigenous scholarship, this talk considers how the objective referents of our coming-to-know are the phenomena produced through our intra-actions. By recognising how properties and boundaries are emergent and enacted rather than a given, this talk figures attunement as a responsive, deep listening, and methodological counter to the epistemic violences of habituated, extractivist, settler colonial logics that undergird museological and conservation practices.