INCCA Talk: From Bits to Ink – Preserving and Printing Digital-Based Photographic Artworks

19th June 2025

3pm CEST / 9am EDT / 2pm BST / 9pm CST (Amsterdam 3pm / London 2pm / Gweru 3pm / Seoul 10pm / Mexico City 7am / LA 6am)

Monica Marchesi, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, in conversation with Vivian van Saaze, Maastricht University & Dutch Heritage Agency.  

INCCA is pleased to invite you to an upcoming INCCA Talk, where conservator Monica Marchesi, will present a newly developed guidelines titled “From Bits to Ink – Preserving and Printing Digital-Based Photographic Works” aimed at supporting the conservation community. 

As more artists deliver their photographic works in digital formats, museums increasingly acquire digital files rather than physical prints—along with the rights to produce them for exhibition. This shift introduces complex challenges related to acquisition, conservation, authorship, and material authenticity. 

Developed as part of the NWO Museum Grant project, “Print on Demand. Printing Digital Artworks through a Collaborative Mode of Production”, this guideline offers clear and accessible recommendations for museum professionals—particularly those responsible for the acquisition, conservation and presentation of digital-based photography. It provides a structured approach to managing the translation of a digital file into a photographic print, ensuring thoughtful decision-making from acquisition to (re)printing. 

Based on extensive interviews and collaborative discussions with a wide range of professionals—artists, conservators, curators, registrars, and printing experts—this document reflects a shared, cross-disciplinary effort to address the evolving needs of contemporary photographic conservation. 

We look forward to welcoming our international colleagues to this conversation. 

For better language accessibility we provide English live caption and (language to be confirmed) AI translation in this event.

Please register here.

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Monica Marchesi, paper conservator at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (The Netherlands) 

Monica Marchesi is an art historian and paper conservator at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (SMA). She strongly advocates for the value of practice-driven research, where material and technical investigation, active conservation, cultural heritage management, conservation theory, and museum studies intersect. Her primary interest is in the reprinting of photographic artworks as a conservation strategy. She has delivered numerous presentations, authored peer-reviewed publications, and was awarded a PhD degree from the Leiden University (2017) on this subject. 

Over the past decade, she was actively involved in several research projects the Photographs and Preservation. How to save photographic works of art for the future? within the NWO research program Science4Arts (2012 – 2016); Rineke Dijkstra: Exploring the reprinting of color photography as a conservation strategy (2019 -2021). In 2024 she was awarded a NWO Museum grant for the project Print on Demand: Printing digital-based artworks through a collaborative mode of production.

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To offer a deeper exploration of the guidelines, a dedicated INCCA Special Interest Meeting will be held on 10th July 2025. This will be a smaller, interactive session limited to 20 participants, providing an opportunity for in-depth discussion and valuable feedback exchange. We invite those with a strong interest in the topic to also join the meeting on 10 July 2025, which registration will be open after this Talk. If the number of subscriptions exceeds the maximum number of participants, INCCA will select participants to ensure an even distribution from different parts of the world.