Critical Conservation
Assembly #1:
Communities OF Practice
DECEMBER 3-4, 2026
Conservation has often been understood as the technical stabilization of material objects, guided by professional expertise and institutional authority. While this paradigm has shaped Western conservation practice for decades, it does not fully account for the diverse ways in which communities sustain, transmit, and transform cultural knowledge.
We are announcing Critical Conservation Assembly #1:
Communities OF Practice
DECEMBER 3-4, 2026
HKB Bern & online
Across many cultures, conservation takes place through care, repetition, renewal, storytelling, performance, remaking, and individual and collective memory. Cultural continuity is frequently maintained not through the preservation of objects alone, but through embodied knowledge, relational practices, and intergenerational transmission. Such modes of care can be found in Indigenous knowledge systems as well as in contemporary contexts such as performance and digital art. At the same time, practices of transmission are often entangled with colonial histories, institutional frameworks, and economic realities, raising ongoing questions about authority, expertise, ownership, and custodianship.
The Assembly is conceived both as a setting and a mode of practice through which knowledge is collectively produced. As the first gathering in the Critical Conservation: Communities of Practice series, it invites participants to rethink conservation as a relational, pluricultural, and political practice.
The central question guiding the assembly is: How do communities of practice reshape conservation when it is understood not merely as the preservation of objects, but as a collective practice that sustains and transmits knowledge, gestures, values, and forms of communal life? If you would like to learn more about the assembly and/or participate, please consult our call for participation available here.
Center for Critical Conservation 