Center for Critical Conservation

Center for Critical Conservation
Mission & Manifesto

The Center for Critical Conservation is founded on the conviction that conservation is not merely a technical practice of stabilizing objects, but a deeply cultural, epistemic, and political activity—one that shapes how we understand time, value, memory, and the conditions of coexistence.

Our mission is to bring together scholars and practitioners of conservation with thinkers across the humanities and beyond, fomenting a cross-disciplinary dialogue. At its core, the Center seeks to expand what conservation is—and what it can do. We aim to reposition conservation as a critical practice of knowledge production, one that offers unique insights into how humans live, relate, and act within complex material, social, and ecological worlds.

Grounded in the principle that conservation generates knowledge—not only about objects, but about systems of value, care, and power—the Center engages conservation as a site where politics, ethics, and cultural imaginaries converge. It attends to the international and transnational dimensions of conservation, foregrounding questions of intersectionality, inequity, and the uneven distribution of cultural and environmental care.

A partner for the SNSF Critical Conservation project, the Center provides a platform for dialogue between conservation scholars, museum and heritage professionals, and researchers in adjacent and intersecting fields, including anthropology, performance studies, media studies, art history, history, curatorial and museum studies, and beyond. It facilitates exchanges between different “cultures of conservation”: scientific and artisanal, traditional and contemporary, institutional and vernacular.

Emerging from a need to consolidate critical approaches to the conservation of contemporary and recent media, the Center operates with a broader horizon. Its understanding of conservation is global, plural, and relational. We actively cultivate dialogues not only across disciplinary boundaries, but across geographies, epistemologies, and lived experiences—between practitioners and theorists, individuals and communities, professional and embodied forms of knowledge.

The Center for Critical Conservation is thus not only a place of study, but a space of encounter. It invites reflection on conservation as a practice of care, negotiation, and responsibility in a world marked by polycrisis. It asks: What does it mean to conserve—not only objects, but relations, environments, and presents/futures?