The Critical Conservation Essay section presents reflections, provocations, and research emerging from the project and its wider community of scholars, artists, and practitioners. Published regularly on this page, these writings confront questions at the heart of Critical Conservation: What does it mean to conserve in a time of ecological collapse and planetary crisis? What — and whom — are we trying to preserve? Where does conservation stand in a more-than-human world? What does it mean to decolonize conservation and challenge its institutional histories? Who holds the authority to conserve, and whose knowledge counts? How might conservation be radically rethought across art, craft, heritage, science, and the environment? The series invites diverse voices and experimental formats, opening a space for critical inquiry and new imaginaries of conservation.
Conservation as Storytelling
CONVERSATION WITH SRUTHIN LAL
What exactly is preserved when a song is recorded? Is it the sound, the words, the performance, the knowledge carried by the singer, or the relationships through which that knowledge has been learned and passed on? A recording can hold a song, but the people who taught it, the occasions on which it is performed, and the social world that gives it meaning remain largely outside the frame.
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Field Notes from the Colombian Amazon
UPDATES FROM JULIANA ROBLES DE LA PAVA
My journey through the Colombian Amazon began in Leticia, in what is known as the Amazonian Trapezoid—a point of connection across a border that exists primarily within the framework of the nation-state, but not for the many Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities who inhabit this territory. This journey brought me into contact with communities, their ancestral and contemporary knowledge and techniques, their ways of speaking, and their ways of conceiving the world.
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Who Decides How Ladakh’s Monasteries Are Conserved?
BY SAMIDHA PUSALKAR
In Ladakh’s Buddhist monasteries, damage is often noticed long before it is repaired. A leaking drain, a damaged wall painting, an unstable beam, or a broken ritual object: monks photograph the problem or make a note of it and pass their observations to senior monks and managers. Decisions ultimately rest with the head monk. Monastic administration follows a pattern in which observations emerge from the base of the hierarchy, while judgement rests at the top.
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Care as negotiation: translation and the indigenization of conservation through the Amazon
CONVERSATION WITH CARLOS FAUSTO
On July 8, 2026, we had the pleasure of welcoming Carlos Fausto, Brazilian anthropologist based at the National Museum of Brazil, for an extraordinary conversation on what conservation might become when approached through plural forms of worldmaking and ways of knowing. Together, we reflected on how engaging with the ecologies of knowledge cultivated across the Amazon opens new epistemic and political possibilities for rethinking conservation beyond its conventional frameworks.
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Field Notes from Varanasi and Ladakh
UPDATES FROM SAMIDHA PUSALKAR
What happens when we stop thinking of religious heritage primarily as material inherited from the past, and instead attend to the practices, relationships, knowledge and decisions through which it is continually remade? Fieldwork over the past months has taken our team member and senior researcher Samidha Pusalkar into two very different landscapes of living religious heritage in India. In this intervention, she reflects on preservation in Varanasi, a dense pilgrimage city built around temples, ghats, homes, commerce and the Ganga; and on Ladakh, a high-altitude world of monasteries, traditional knowledge, and construction practices now under pressure from a changing climate and a changing economy.
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Beyond Data Collection: Rethinking Conservation Science through Community-Based Research
CONVERSATION WITH THIAGO PUGLIERI
On July 14, 2026, we welcomed Thiago Puglieri, technical art historian, conservation scientist, and Assistant Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His work invites us to rethink conservation by asking essential questions: Who decides what is worth studying? Who benefits from research? And what responsibilities do researchers have toward the communities whose heritage they investigate? Rather than treating Indigenous communities as sources of information, Puglieri argues that they must become partners in every stage of research.
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Unsettling reconciliation: on Indigenous Care Giving, Museums, and the Future of Conservation
CONVERSATION WITH JOHN MOSES
On July 2, 2026, we had the pleasure of welcoming John Moses, former Director of Repatriation and Indigenous Relations at the Canadian Museum of History and descendant of the Delaware and Upper Mohawk bands from the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory near Brantford, Ontario. In this conversation, Moses shared with us how, for him, it is important to place museum conservation practice within the broader context of Canada’s overarching Indigenous Truth and Reconciliation agenda.
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Conservation as a Matter of Context
CONVERSATION WITH OGECHUKWU ELIZABETH OKPALANOZIE
On May 19, 2026, the research team behind Critical Conservation met with Ogechukwu Elizabeth Okpalanozie, Conservator at the National Museum, Lagos of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments in Nigeria, for a thought-provoking discussion on the decolonization of conservation practices, the recognition of community-based conservation knowledge, and the importance of sustainability and situated approaches in conservation methods.
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Uncommoning Conservation: Situated Counter-narratIves Across Multinatural Worlds
ESSAY BY JULIANA ROBLES DE LA PAVA
The notion of Critical Conservation urges us to be suspicious of any stable equivalence and compels us to inhabit contradictions rather than resolve them. In his well-known essay Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern, Bruno Latour proposes a reorientation of critical thought: not toward dismantling what is taken as given or self-evident, but toward engaging with what truly matters, those networks of people, instruments, practices and institutions that affect both humans and other-than-human beings on this planet.
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LIVING HERITAGE, INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE, AND CONSERVATION BEYOND THE OBJECT
CONVERSATION WITH TARA SHARMA
As part of the ongoing conversations within the Critical Conservation project, on May 11, 2026, we had the pleasure of welcoming Tara Sharma, founder and director of the Jungwa Foundation, for an internal discussion on people-centred heritage conservation, indigenous knowledge systems, and the entanglements of cultural and ecological care.
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The Architectural Palimpsest: Ritual, Renewal, and Critical Conservation
ESSAY BY SAMIDHA PULSAKAR
Modern conservation theory is predominantly informed by a Western material ontology that privileges original fabric, age-value, and expert authority. Articulated through influential charters such as the Venice Charter (1964) and institutionalised within global heritage frameworks like UNESCO, this paradigm equates authenticity with the physical continuity of historic material. Within this model, conservation is conceptualised as the stabilisation of the past, preserving tangible remnants of a specific historical moment and protecting them from alteration.
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