19 January 2023: Symposium & Farewell Lecture Renée van de Vall: “Care as Transdisciplinary Concept”

On Thursday 19 January 2023, the symposium “Care as Transdisciplinary Concept” took place at the Jan van Eyck Academie. The symposium was held on the occasion of Renée van de Vall’s farewell.

‘Care’ is a notion that has gained visibility as a critical concept in various fields of academic research. In contemporary art conservation, it promises a way to open up restricted notions of conservation and preservation in the face of inevitable change. The notion of care also opens up ways to reframe human-animal relations in terms of mutual connectivity and dependency, as opposed to autonomous agency, instrumentality and competition. This raises the question of how contemporary art conservation can engage with this theoretical movement and, vice versa, what it can contribute to this body of thought.

The symposium centered around theories of care in relation to topics such as contemporary art conservation, music conservation, health and dementia care, and human-animal relations. Bringing researchers from these various fields in conversation with each other invited them to reflect on what these fields can learn from each other. Under the guidance of moderators Tatja Scholte and IJsbrand Hummelen, the researchers explored care as a transdisciplinary concept.

Later that afternoon, Renée van de Vall gave her farewell lecture at the Aula of Maastricht University. The lecture, titled “Caring for contemporary art: Reflections on ethics and aesthetics in precarious times” explored what it means to rethink the conservation of contemporary art in terms of care. In particular, the conservation of Joost Conijn’s Hout Auto raised the question of how the conservation community can widen its taskscapes of care. Renée urges us to look around, rather than ahead; “look around deliberately, consistently and collaboratively, beyond the established museum and university practices, for the cracks where care is needed”.

The valedictory lecture has been recorded and can be viewed at https://youtu.be/v3BTq_6fnUw. The full transcript of the farewell speech can be found at https://doi.org/10.26481/spe.20230119rv.