Date and time
-We are excited to announce the fifth INCCA Café: Student & Early Career Research: Innovative Treatments, focusing on the challenges of contemporary materials in the conservation of contemporary art. The Café will be held on the 5th June 2025, 4pm CEST (Amsterdam 4pm / London 3pm / Gweru 4pm / Seoul 11pm / Mexico City 8am / LA 7am).
Presentations will be given by Clarissa Faccini de Lima, Catarina Rocha Pires and Edwin Huang. The talks will include two PhD summaries, the first discussing material incompatibility in contemporary art with a case study on Cabrita’s "Flor Negra" (1999) and how magnetism has been tested as an alternative method to control the physical-mechanical alterations of the metal support. The second will summarise ongoing research on how atomic oxygen can be used to clean sensitive paintings and how this compares to other methods such as soft cellulose particle blasting, CO₂ snow, and laser cleaning, and other traditional cleaning techniques. The final talk will examine the material and theoretical challenges involved in the conservation of time-based media installations and how non-Western methodologies can be used to care for them.
The talks will be followed by an open and informal conversation with all speakers and participants about how the choice of the artist’s materials impacts and influences the conservation of these works.
For better language accessibility we provide English live caption and Portuguese AI translation in this event.
All are welcome to join. Please register here.
Presenters' bio (by presentation order)
Clarissa Faccini de Lima (Porto Alegre, Brazil) is a PhD candidate in Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Porto. Her research focuses on material incompatibility in contemporary art, with a particular emphasis on developing innovative conservation methods using magnetism. Clarissa holds a Master's degree in Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage from the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Porto, and a Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. She has experience working with contemporary art collections at the Serralves Museum in Porto. Her research interests encompass the intersection of art, science, and technology in conservation practices, as well as the ethical considerations surrounding the preservation of contemporary artworks.
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Catarina Rocha Pires is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, part of the Horizon Europe MOXY project, supervised by Prof Dr. Klaas Jan van den Berg and Dr. Emilie Froment. She holds both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Conservation and Restoration from the NOVA School of Science and Technology in Lisbon, Portugal. Before beginning her PhD, Catarina gained practical experience in conservation and restoration and conservation science through internships at the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE) in Amsterdam, SRAL The Conservation Institute in Maastricht, and several museums in Lisbon.
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Edwin Huang is a second-year MSc student in the Conservation of Contemporary Art and Media programme at University College London. He is passionate about the material and theoretical challenges involved in the conservation of time-based media installations. His master's thesis focuses on novel and non-Western methodologies in the care of artist-modified sound equipment in time-based media installations, supervised by Dr Brian Castriota.
Photo 1: Senior Conservator Jinxian Qiu (the British Museum) showing her stockpile of antique silk patches from the 1600s, used to repair silk scrolls. Image: Edwin Huang.
Photo 2: Soft particle blasting tests on model painting (cadmium yellow acrylic) with layer of artificial dirt. Photo by Camilla Dongelmans (MA student doing her project within MOXY).
Photo 3: Serralves.