Looking closer at Potatotemporal
January 10, 2025Mobilizing Museum Minerals – Virtual Launch Event
January 15, 2025Spending more time with The Fiction of Permanence: Materials Guides – Felt
To start the new year, we’re spending more time with our new research project Objects as Temporal Entities. We begin with The Fiction of Permanence: Materials Guides.
Two: Felt
1: One of the key points of tension in building a more sustainable institution is that between the duty of care museums have towards artworks, artefacts, and belongings in their collections, and
the energy and materials required to preserve those collections.
2: DIRECTION: Include wool felt in artworks in ways that are attuned to the artist, the fibres, the gallery, and the more-than-human species entangled therein.
3: Although by no means a new material, felt continues to complicate conservation efforts in museum collections with its vulnerability to degradation by insect infestation — a phenomenon that continues to shift with the conditions of climate change and the negative impacts of toxic fumigation treatments.
4: Might we embrace strategies of intervention or mitigation that do not rely on toxic chemicals that are harmful for both human and more-than-human life? The treatment of textiles with cold temperatures is proven as a natural moth deterrent, and lavender (both flower and oil) has been used to great success in domestic applications due to several terpenes found in the plant.
5: Download FELT, part of The Fiction of Permanence: Materials Guides series: an expandable set of guides, each dedicated to understanding the degradation of a single material through a case study (either from France or the Great Lakes region).
Text: Katie Lawson
Design: Liza Eurich
Objects as Temporal Entities is a project developed by the Centre for Sustainable Curating with members of the Synthetic Collective as a part of the Sustainable Institution (TSI). The TSI programme is an artist-in-residence programme by LUMA Arles (Atelier LUMA), the E-WERK Luckenwalde, and Rupert Centre for Art and Education. It is co-funded by the European Union, Teltow Flaming and Lithuanian Culture Council.