Chief Mentor, Kim Kraczon
“What excites me the most about collaborating with The Synthetic Collective as artists in residence in the sustainable institution is the challenge their work poses to prevailing standards in museum collections stewardship and resource intensive conservation conventions by granting artists the agency to sanction natural aging processes of materials over time and ultimately determine the lifespan of their own artworks.”
Kim Kraczon, conservator of modern materials and contemporary art specialising in sustainable solutions for cultural heritage, Director of Materials at Ki Culture, Advisor at Gallery Climate Coalition. Her area of expertise and primary focus in the field of sustainability is mitigating the environmental burden of materials and methods in art production, exhibitions, and fine arts shipping. Through her work with various sustainability organizations, Kraczon is regularly at the forefront of research and discourse on a wide range of sustainability topics, participating in numerous symposiums, panels, and webinars internationally. At Ki Culture, Kraczon is the Director of Materials and at the helm of the Materials Ki Book, an online sustainability guide for practitioners in cultural heritage. As a coach in the Ki Futures program, an international training program comprehensively addressing all aspects of sustainability in cultural heritage, Kraczon regularly consults museums, galleries, and cultural institutions. Kraczon is an Environmental Advisor to Gallery Climate Coalition and a founding member/operational lead of the Gallery Climate Coalition Berlin. She holds a BA in the Conservation of Modern Materials and Technical Cultural Heritage from the Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin and an MA in the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage: Specialization in Contemporary Art from the University of Amsterdam with a focus on plastics, time-based media, and sus-
tainable materials in contemporary art. Her previous professional experience includes resident conservator at Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin, where she developed sustainable strategies for production and packing materials, as well as working with museums and independent conservators in Germany.
Prototype 4: The Acquisitions Addendum (AA)
The AA can be used to help understand the articles of the accompanying Acquisitions Riders and Discussion Points. Though not exhaustive, the AA provides links, examples, case studies, and tools to help understand how materials change over time and what those changes might mean for artists, museums, and collectors. The focus is currently on Western art history and its institutions, but we hope to broaden the scope to include a more diverse range of perspectives and frameworks in the future. Those interested can also consult the expanding list of The Fiction of Permanence: Material Guides produced as a part of this project. Each guide is dedicated to understanding the lifespan and degradation of a single material.
Link to Acquisitions contract template here.
Prototype 3: THE FICTION OF PERMANENCE Material Guides
The Acquisitions Rider and Addendum are supported by The Fiction of Permanence, a series of materials guides, each a short handbook dedicated to a single material and artwork case study, designed to illustrate what happens as different substances degrade over time. The Fiction of Permanence guides are available digitally and are printed using risograph duplication, an eco-friendly form of printing. They have been designed in a colour palette derived from the natural dyes found at Atelier LUMA.
Each guide explores one material that was central to our time in Arles, France or to our work in the Great Lakes Region. Four guides have been completed:
Over time we will create a guide that corresponds to each of the materials used to create the potato art objects included in Potatotemporal. Future guides will include:
WOOD, PAPER, SALT, LATEX, SUNFLOWER MARROW, CLAY, MYCELIUM, PVC and POLYURETHANE
Prototype 2: POTATOTEMPORAL DISPLAY and SHIPPING
5 identical small crates function both as display and packing boxes/shelves. When stacked, the crates will combine into a single box for easy shipping. Each small crate is lined with ¼ inch cork which also acts as an inset support for the acrylic sheet. The acrylic sheet functions as both a window to the packing materials inside the crate and a surface for exhibiting potato sculptures.
Each small crate will have predrilled holes for mounting to a wall from the inside. Packing materials will be various – composed of all salvaged packing including starch foam in sheets and peanuts, honeycomb cardboard, and expandible paper mesh. Once shipped for the first time, the crates will show the marks of their passage with have all the FRAGILE labels, opening/closing indicator marks, “this way up” labels, and various shipping and import labels and stamps. The “clean” state of the crates in the documentation photos will not last. 4 potatoes (2 pairs) will ship in each small crate – a total of 18 potato sculptures. One of the boxes will have only two potatoes, and thus will also hold all the material guides, flowcharts, and other ephemera. While on display, the box holding two potatoes, will have space to display the real potatoes which will be sourced locally.
Materials: Salvaged wood, Salvaged ¼ cork sheet, Off-cut acrylic sheet from framer and Salvaged starch foam from various “meal kits” (usually corn starch)
Qualities:
-Naturally static free
-Sugars are removed from the starch before manufacture so it does not attract bugs or rodents
-Technically edible (though not recommended/ not made in foodsafe facilities) and made in the same machine as cheese puffs
-Performs better than polystyrene in crush tests
-Polystyrene based packing peanuts tend to migrate or snap within a box when pressed under weight.
Bio
The Centre for Sustainable Curating supports museum research, exhibitions, visual/digital production, and pedagogy focused on environmental and social justice. Located in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University (Canada), CSC projects focus on waste, pollution, and climate crisis, and the development of exhibitions and artworks with low carbon and waste footprints. The Synthetic Collective is an interdisciplinary collaboration among visual artists, humanities scholars, and scientists centred on plastic pollution in the Great Lakes watershed of North America (a massive system of lakes that holds more than 20 per cent of the world’s surface freshwater reserves). Crucial to the SC’s research methodology is the driving principle that artists and scientists conduct research together from the outset of the inquiry, and that research should not result in further environmental harm. The SC works to better connect scientific knowledge with cultural work, and to enrich artistic production with informed science. For this residency, the CSC and SC have come together to define and tackle the knowledge gaps in creating sustainable institutions, using our expertise in plastics, low-waste and low-carbon curating, pedagogy, and accessibility, as well as our location in a geographic region of extreme weather and changing landscapes, as guiding factors in our contribution.
The Centre for Sustainable Curating
Residency at LUMA Arles
Prototype: Acquisitions Contract, low-data solar powered website plan, materials guide
Chief mentor: Kim Kraczon
We propose a holistic, scalable, and adaptable process of sustainable exhibition making that emerges from the guiding principles of repair, communication, and relationship-building. The outcomes include:
1. An adaptable acquisitions contract that allows for the decay of artworks and objects
2. a plan for low-data solar-powered exhibition websites, and
3. a materials guide for artwork production and installation that is specifically attuned to accessibility and inclusivity.
Each of these outcomes is designed to build from work already done by our collectives and other important groups such as the Gallery Climate Coalition and Ki Culture. Thus, the objective is to define and tackle the knowledge gaps in creating sustainable institutions, using our areas of expertise in plastics, low-waste and low-carbon curating, pedagogy, and accessibility, as well as our location in a geographic region of extreme weather and landscapes as guiding factors in our contribution. Our objectives will be carried out with accessibility, clarity and low data design in mind, and be ready to implement in a range of exhibition venues, from small to large-scale, and from urban to rural to virtual.
Prototype 1: A low-data solar-powered exhibition website.
A materials guide for artwork production and installation
The website and archive can be accessed at www.archivetemporal.com
PLEASE NOTE THAT THE WEBSITE IS ONLY AVAILABLE FROM 9am to 5pm Eastern Standard Time, when the solar panels have enough energy to run it.
Generally, during the winter and when it is sunny (in London, ON), the site will be available Monday through Friday, 12 pm – 4 pm EST. On cloudy or snowy days the site will be offline. The hardware running the site charges over the weekend (the site will be offline). As the season changes, we will update you on the site’s online hours. The website provides a home for the various components of the project. It also includes an image archive of our time in Arles and our work on the various components of Objects as Temporal Entities. The images have been dithered to reduce their size, and the archive is organized so that it can be explored in multiple ways.
