Anna Schäffler: The Art of Preservation. An invited lecture and a panel discussion jointly organized by SNSF Activating Fluxus and SNSF Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge within the Research Wednesday seminar series, Bern University of the Arts

Today’s challenges in dealing with the legacy of contemporary artists require new structural models for preservation and are leading to a radical shift of our western memory culture. Based on her own experience of working with the estate of German conceptual artist Anna Oppermann (1943-1992) Anna Schäffler argues that rather than conserve once and forever a given material state, we need new, cooperative forms of preservation that allow for the further evolution and change of a work of art in line with the artistic concept. In the wake of the dissolution of the arts in the 1960s the kind of preservation she proposes amounts to a new dissolution: Given that so-called “networks of care” take on preservation tasks leads to a profound restructuring of museums in their function as repositories of memory and reveals the instituent potential of contemporary art preservation. In elevating preservation to a condition of contemporary art, Anna suggests a radical perspective on preservation practices enabling the contemporaneity of contemporary art in the atomic age.