Regional Live Hub 2 (part 2)

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Fanxuan Fu

Tuesday, Regional Live Hub 2: India & Southeast Asia

The second half of the India & Southeast Asia Live Hub started the special session with three posters and two Keck Awards nominees presentations, still hosted by Chaitra Sharad and Aditya Prakash Kanth.

The poster session started with Bianca Gonçalves presenting Turning to Green Conservation for the Preservation of Culture Heritage. She emphasized the importance of sustainable practice in art conservation by drawing on her experience as a volunteer at the Amazonia. Leonardo Tavares, a conservator from Brazil then gave an example of such practice in his paper Sustainable Practices in Conservation: Agar-Agar Gels for The Cleaning of Unvarnished Paintings. He introduced the potential of Agar-agar gel as a sustainable material to be used in the cleaning process of oil painting. After that, Nádia Silva talked about a new method for outdoor sculpture preventive conservation from the point of view of a microbiologist in the research Antimicrobial Potential of Chitosan-Based Coatings for The Preventive Conservation of Urban Outdoor Stone Sculptures. These posters caught my eye for putting focus on sustainability. With the existing threat of climate and energy crisis, it is really an important issue that needs our immediate attention.

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Subsequently, two Keck Award nominees from India and China introduced their projects. “Conserving the Collection” presented an eight-year exhibition series on conserving historic and artistic works at the CSMVS Museum, Mumbai, India. The project focuses on the role of the museum in public engagement of conservation. Through continuously displaying over 8,028 museum objects that have been conserved and restored in 11 exhibitions, the project aims to raise the public’s awareness of art conservation and build the capacity of conservation students and professionals. “In The Time of Pandemic” showcased the community participation in the daily Inspection of Heritage in Changping District, Beijing, China from 2018 to 2022. This project uses digital technology to empower the public to be involved in preventive conservation, which is a new approach to dealing with the long-lasting challenge of human resource shortage in the daily monitoring of historic monuments and sites. These two projects really showed that the public could be engaged with heritage conservation and the possible ways to release their great potential.

AUTHOR 

Fanxuan Fu is a student from MSc Sustainable Heritage, University College London

IMAGE CAPTION

Screenshot from “Conserving the Collection: A Series of Exhibitions on Art Conservation Over 7 years” by Anupam Sah, in India & Southeast Asia Live Hub (Keck Award Special Session).