Castriota, Brian;
(2025)
Attunement as an embodied methodology for conservation practices.
Journal of the Institute of Conservation
10.1080/19455224.2025.2547339.
(In press).
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Abstract
This article proposes attunement as an embodied methodology for conservation practices, grounded in relationality, intra-dependence and affective responsiveness. Borrowing from agential realism and posthumanist, queer, feminist, Indigenous, Black and anti-colonial scholarship, it critiques dominant conservation frameworks rooted in settler colonial and capitalist logics that prioritise extraction, certainty and control. In contrast, it explores how caring for artworks-as-cultural-heritage—and as emergent, indeterminate parts of the world—requires attentiveness and responsiveness to the ethical, political and affective dimensions of artworks and their extended material-discursive ecologies. Attunement is positioned as a practice of listening-with and allowing oneself to be stilled, reconfigured and mobilised toward more reciprocal and coalitional ways of knowing and doing. Recognising that the knowledge we produce is not neutral but intra-actively constituted through our methods, this article foregrounds attunement as a methodological counter to the epistemic violence enacted by extractivist, habituated and universalising conservation practices. It invites conservators to reckon with the inheritances and violences of colonialism and capitalism in their work—including around how knowledge is generated and recorded—and to imagine conservation as part of a broader practice of solidarity work, relational care and world-making.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Attunement as an embodied methodology for conservation practices |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/19455224.2025.2547339 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/19455224.2025.2547339 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
| Keywords: | contemporary art conservation; agential realism; deep listening; attunement; conservation ethics; anti-colonial methodology |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of History of Art |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10215844 |
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