How conservation matters: Ethnographic explorations of historic building renovation

Abstract

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Getting the Right Shade of Ochre: Valuation of a Building’s Historicity

“…By ethnographically following the makings and the valuations of the color ochre-stratigraphic examinations, documenting and archival research, cultural interpretations, and the various ways urban experts look at and move around Wrocław Główny-I use the case of its reconstruction to examine valuations and devaluations of historicity and the relationships that do or do not hold it together. Informed by an emerging field of studies of conservation practices (Dimova, 2013(Dimova, , 2019Herzfeld, 2009;Jones & Yarrow, 2013;MacDonald, 2009MacDonald, , 2013Meyer & De Witte, 2013;van de Port & Meyer, 2018;Sezneva, 2013;Yarrow, 2019), I analyze how different techniques of valuation reveal various "goods" and, as a consequence, make and unmake various versions of historicity. A plurality of historicities offers a different perspective from that of the building-as-a-palimpsest (Huyssen, 2003).…”

“…In this article, I, thus, follow Steven Shapin's call for "ethnographies-contemporary and historical-of how taste judgments come to be formed, discussed, and sometimes shared" (p. 177). Along with other scholars who approach matters of conservation and historical reconstructions with an anthropological eye (Dimova, 2013(Dimova, , 2019Dominguez Rubio, 2014;Herzfeld, 2009;Jones & Yarrow, 2013;MacDonald, 2009MacDonald, , 2013Meyer & De Witte, 2013;van de Port & Meyer, 2018;Sezneva, 2013;Yarrow, 2019), I look at the activities of valuation and devaluation of historicity, how these activities unfold materially, and how "different visions of 'the good' are at stake in a range of dilemmas about what should be kept and why" (Yarrow, 2019, p. 5). However, I propose a different vision of historicity from the one common in this emerging field of research.…”

Noise in the landscape: Disputing the visibility of mundane technological objects

“…This elusiveness is most visible in the specific material characteristics of the topic vis-à-vis other types of technological objects in terms of their capacity for symbolization. The favoured examples of either landscape study in general or technoscape in particular are, respectively, those that relate at least in part to monuments, as in the case of archeological heritage sites (Butler, 2006; Rowlands and Tilley, 2006 ), or in the industrial version (Sumartodjo and Graves, 2018; Yarrow, 2018), the changing symbolism of modern buildings (MacDonald, 2006) and large-scale techno-structures (Katagi, 1995; Okada, 2003), which can be regarded as ‘technologically sublime’ (Nye, 1996). Inherently, the topic of this article excludes such characterizations because of their utterly ubiquitous, unflashy and ongoing nature.…”

Giants in the lab: Model conservation and the anaphoric progression of design

“…Recent work on the material culture of conservation examined the shifting processes of decay and repair of historical buildings (Edensor, 2011), the practices of building conservation (Eggert, 2009; Jones and Yarrow, 2013; Yaneva, 2008; Yarrow, 2019), of maintenance, record-keeping and installation of artworks in museum settings (Dominguez Rubio, 2016; Kreplak, 2018) by giving due regard to the multiplicity of human and non-human agents (i.e. materials, documents, instruments and protocols).…”

“…Defying essentialist logics, conservation is understood as a practice ‘performed’ through the collectives of people, documents, materials and representational technologies. Yet, the ethnographic complexity of specific practices of conservation remains relatively poorly understood with a few exceptions of actor-network theory (ANT) inspired studies of historic buildings, focusing on how people articulate the importance of the past (Yarrow, 2019) and the quotidian challenges posed by specific material and spatial agencies (Yaneva, 2008). If the existing ethnographic accounts trace how different forms of expertise and skill coalesce to produce specific material interventions in conservation, little attention is paid to the epistemic complexity of specific conservation moves.…”