Caring for the living: the conservation of performance art

As many disciplines are beginning to reckon with their contributions to historical injustices, so conservation must acknowledge and reflect on the number of its practices that continue to reinforce colonial and imperial legacies. Though such work is currently taking place in ethnographic museums, rethinking conservation and repairing its harms should be the aim of the entire museum community. Using case studies drawn from performance art, this paper demonstrates how performance challenges traditional paradigms of institutional collecting and conservation, and calls for a rethinking of certain museum procedures. It proposes the emerging scholarship on performance art conservation as a potential force for an expanded definition of conservation that puts people at its center. To this end, it presents performance as not only a conservation object to be cared for, but also a tool to care with, reframing the aim of conservation as preserving the vitality of relationships between objects and communities.