INCCA Café: Student & Early Career Research

We are excited to announce the INCCA Café: Student & Early Career Research on the 14th of March,  1pm CET (Amsterdam 1pm/London 12pm/Gweru 2pm/Seoul 9pm/Mexico City 6am/LA 5am/New York 8am)! 

Presentations will be given by Willa Ratz, Vittoria Gelati, Anna Mladentseva, Daniella Briceño Villamil and Brian Dunbar, and Loreal Vos. Topics will touch upon the documentation, display, and preservation of contemporary art, including time-based media works, software-based art & design and South African artists’ books, including a case study on the immersive artwork Lobe of the Lung by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist. This will be followed by an open and informal conversation with all speakers and participants. 

All are welcome to join. Register here.

Update on 29th February: For better language accessibility we provide English caption and Korean translation in this event. 

Presenters bio (by presentation order)

Willa Ratz (she/her) is an emerging conservator from Canada currently living and working in the UK. Her educational background includes a bachelor's degree in chemistry with a double minor in fine art and materials engineering from the University of Toronto and a master's degree in Easel Painting Conservation at Northumbria University, which she graduated from in 2022. She has since worked as a conservation sustainability intern at Northumbria University and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and as a painting conservation intern at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. She has now been working for the past year at the Tate as an Assistant Time-Based Media Conservator, where her role mainly focuses on the acquisition and preservation of various media artworks, including 35mm film and slide works, digital video, software-based artworks and multi-media installations. Her research and work interests include complex, multi-media artworks and ephemeral media, as well as ethical gallery practices.  

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Vittoria Gelati has been a post-graduate Fellow in the media art department at the Restaurierungszentrum Düsseldorf since 2022. Here she looks after both the analogue and digital media of multimedia artworks belonging to the City of Düsseldorf and other collections. Her tasks include the digitisation of old formats, the long-term archiving of digital-native works and the documentation of complex installations. Previously, she worked on projects for the preservation of Italian audiovisual heritage, including "Archivi della Videoarte e dei film d'artista in Italia", funded by the Italian Ministry of Culture, and "Art.c.Hive" for CareOf Milano. During her studies, she completed internships at the Film Archive and Cinema Museum of the Cineteca Italiana in Milan, as well as at the Restoration Department of the ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien in Karlsruhe. In 2016 she obtained a Bachelor's degree in Conservation Science at the University of Milan and in 2018 a Master's degree in Audiovisual Studies at the University of Udine (DAMS), Italy. 

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Anna Mladentseva is a second-year PhD student funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council and University College London (UK). Her practice-led PhD is in collaboration with the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, where she is working on the conservation of three case studies of software-based art and design from their collection. In recognition that conservation practice often draws from the knowledge and resources of non-conservators and communities that are external to museums, her research questions how museums can interface with these infrastructures in a structured and equitable manner. Previously, she has published her research in the Journal of the Institute of Conservation and has won an international speaker grant to present at the electronic media panel of the American Institute for Conservation’s annual meeting. In addition to her PhD, Anna teaches in her home university, UCL, and works on additional conservation projects. 

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Daniella Briceño Villamil (she/her) is a graduate fellow at the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation (WUDPAC) in the United States. She is currently undergoing her third-year conservation training with the Tate Galleries in the United Kingdom. As a graduate intern, she is working with the time-based media collection to ensure the long-term care of these works as they go through acquisition, loan, exhibition, and display. Daniella will graduate as an objects conservator, specialising in contemporary and time-based media collections, in August 2024. 

Brian Dunbar (he/him) is an audiovisual (AV) project manager and graduate of New York University’s Moving Image Archive and Preservation program in the United States. Having worked in the audiovisual integration industry for six years before attending MIAP, he aims to apply applications from the AV industry to time-based media collections to help ensure their continued long-term care. He continues to work as a project manager in addition to acting as a freelance video digitisation technician and volunteer with XFR Collective. 

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Following her 2015 graduation from the University of Johannesburg with a master's degree in fine art, Loreal Vos developed an interest in incorporating a variety of media into her artworks. The decision to pursue art conservation was made after the discovery of the University of Pretoria's master's programme in tangible heritage conservation, the first master's course of its kind in South Africa. When viewed through the lens of conservation, Vos's artist-centric knowledge of various art media proved to be quite practical. Therefore, Vos strives to increase her understanding of contemporary art conservation to specialise in this domain. Vos graduated with distinction in 2022, and her master's thesis focused on the conservation of contemporary South African mixed media artists' books. Vos endeavours to continue this research through the pursuit of a PhD, given the vast amount of unexplored knowledge on this subject. 

Photo 1: Gretchen Bender's Dumping Core on display at MoMA in 2022. Daniella B. Villamil.

Photo 2: Nam June Paik Fish Flies on Sky, 1975/1985, 3-Channel Videoinstallation, 88 CRT Monitors, Kunstpalast Düsseldorf © Restaurierungszentrum, Düsseldorf.

Photo 3: Detail of mixed media artist book titled Troyeville Diary by Judith Mason (artist). Photograph taken with permission by Loreal Vos. 2022.

Photo 4: Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Photo 5: Installation View of Lobe of the Lung, Tate modern, 2023. Photo © Tate (Matt Greenwood).