Letters to Conservation is a format that reimagines conservation beyond a set of technical methods, approaching it instead as an affective, subjective, and deeply personal practice. The format invites contributors to write letters addressed to conservation. Personal, reflective, critical, poetic or experimental, a letter signals intimacy, direct address, and subjectivity.
In a world marked by ongoing polycrisis—by violence, depersonalisation, indifference, and increasingly automated forms of writing, to name but a few—the project seeks to reclaim writing as a personal act, and to foreground conservation as a practice of care, relation, expression, and, not least, articulation.
These letters form a growing archive of voices that articulate diverse relationships to conservation. A letter is typically between 500 and 1000 words, though flexibility is welcome. A selection from the letters archive will be published and/or presented within the project. If you would like to help suspend the normativity of academic prose, share a letter, or simply receive what is being expressed, we warmly invite you to read—and to write—a letter.
From SAMIDHA
Dear Conservation,
I don’t remember the first time I met you. That’s the strange thing about us, you were always there. I was born into you, in the old city of Kolhapur, where history wasn’t something preserved behind glass …
From Juliana
Dear Conservation,
Writing you a letter fills me with a certain astonishment. I should say it is a kind of wonder that, at the same time, challenges my rational capacities. I found you while trying to grasp more about certain objects that obsessed me for years: photographs …
From Hanna
Dear Conservation,
I did not come to you with a clear calling. When I began my studies, the decision felt pragmatic rather than passionate. I was advised toward a path that might offer stability. In a socialist country, art alone rarely promised a livelihood …
Center for Critical Conservation 