26th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference
Held on 03, 04 Mar 2025
The 26th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía, with the sponsorship of the MAPFRE Foundation, is held on 3 and 4 March 2025. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.
Two attendance formats are available for this edition of the conference:
- In-person: this format costs 25 euros and includes in-person attendance on both days, coffee during the scheduled breaks, an attendance certificate (subject to attendance on both days) and free access to the Museo Reina Sofía on Monday, 3, and Wednesday, 5 March 2025.
- Online platform: this format is free of charge but does not include either an attendance certificate or admission to visit the Museo Reina Sofía. Those who have registered will receive a link to the online platform on 28 February 2025 to follow the live stream of the conference.
At the end of each intervention, participants can raise questions in both formats (in-person and online platform).
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Sponsor
The Mapfre FoundationCollaboration
illycaffèMayte Ortega, Department of Conservation-Restoration, Museo Reina Sofía
jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es / Tel. +34 91 774 10 00 Ext. 289647
Programme
Monday, 3 March 2025
09:30am Opening and Presentation
Manuel Segade (director of the Museo Reina Sofía), Jorge García Gómez-Tejedor (head of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation-Restoration), Mayte Ortega (coordinator of the 26th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference) and María Martínez Cid (exhibitions manager at MAPFRE Foundation)
09:45am Intervention by Ana Laborde Marqueze, Winner of the 2024 National Award for the Restoration and Conservation of Cultural Heritage
10:00am Tri-Uni-Corn (1981), by Antoni Miralda: uTri-Uni-Corn (1981), by Antoni Miralda: The Balance between Conservation Criteria and the Artist’s Decisions
Paula Ercilla Orbañanos (Museo Reina Sofía), Gema Grueso, Cristina López and Vanessa Magali Truchado (C·ART·A Conservación de Arte Actual)
—Presented by: Paula Ercilla Orbañanos
11:00am Restoration and the Museum Project of Twenty-Seven Paperboards for Picasso Tapestries
Reyes Jiménez (independent conservator-restorer) and Aina Vila and Núria Casademunt (Teixell)
—Presented by: Aina Vila and Reyes Jiménez
11:30am Coffee break
12:15pm BISS-Innovation and Best Practice for International Standards On Sculpture Study And Management
Arianne Vanrell and Mayte Ortega (Museo Reina Sofía)
12:30pm The Conservation and Restoration of the Work of José Luis Gómez Perales, a Master of Geometric Abstraction in Spain
Nuria Fuentes (Complutense University of Madrid)
1:00pm Study for the Application of Absorbents to Conserve Filmoteca Española’s NO-DO Collection
Marta Castellano Fuentes (Filmoteca Española), Sonia Santos Gómez (Complutense University of Madrid) and Patricia Uceda Gil (Filmoteca Española)
—Presented by: Marta Castellano Fuentes
1:30pm Treatment to Recover and Digitise Film Material in a State of Nitrate Decomposition
Patricia Uceda Gil, Paloma Sierra Capel, Blanca Rubio Navarro, Pablo Redondo Suárez and Iker Velasco Salgado (Filmoteca Española)
—Presented by: Blanca Rubio and Paloma Sierra
2pm Lunch break
3:45pm An Approach to Teaching Problems in Relation to Conserving Plastics: The Work of Zoe Leonard for Developing Prototypes
Carmen Moral Ruiz (University of Seville) y Laura Luque Rodrigo (University of Jaén)
—Presented by: Carmen Moral Ruiz
4:15pm The Restoration of Two Sculptures by Artist Giovanni Tamburelli: Rusting as a Core Part of the Creative Process
Camila Restrepo (conservator-restorer)
4:45 h Ana Vieira: Installation manuals
Antonia Gaeta (curator), Astrid Suzano (architect and co-founder and CEO of Passa Ao Futuro) and Sofia Gomes (Researcher and manager of the Collection at Museu de Arte Contemporânea Amando Martins, Lisbon, Portugal)
—Presented by: Sofia Gomes
5:15pm Coffee Break
5:15pm Studio Under Mud: Reflections and Learning from the Impact of the DANA Floods on Juan Olivares’s Paintings
Silvia García Fernández-Villa (Complutense University of Madrid) and Juan Olivares (artist)
6:00pm Do Not Discard. Recovering Home Cinema after the DANA Floods in Valencia
Salvador Vivancos, Laura García, Laura Oliver and Clara Sánchez-Dehesa (La red del cine doméstico)
—Presented by: Laura Oliver and Clara Sánchez-Dehesa
6:45pm The Project Sorkuntzatik-Kontserbaziora/From Creation to Conservation in Gordailua, Gipuzkoa’s Heritage Collection Centre
Irene Cárdaba (Gipuzkoa’s Heritage Collection Centre) and Itziar Gutiérrez Fernández (art historian)
—Presented by: Irene Cárdaba
7:15pm Challenges During the Documentation Process of Escultura dentro da Floresta (1968-1969), by Alberto Carneiro
Inês Tavares (MA from the School of Arts, Universidade Católica Portuguesa de Oporto, Portugal) and Joana Cristina Moreira Teixeira (Research Center for Science and Technology of the Arts CITAR and School of Arts, Universidade Católica Portuguesa de Oporto)
—Presented by Inês Tavares
Presentation in English
7:45pm Conclusion
Tuesday, 4 March 2025
9:30am Juan Gris: Between Forms and Colours. An Approach to His Composition Method
Alicia García González (conservator-restorer) and Humberto Durán Roque (Hduran Conservation-Restoration)
—Presented by: Alicia García González
10:00am Intervention on an Arte Povera Work by Artist Jannis Kounellis. Textile Reinforcement in Burlap Sacks
Aitziber Velasco
—Presented by: Miren Oteros (UPV-EHU) and Aitziber Velasco (Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa)
10:30am h Using a Cutting Plotter: Applications in Conserving and Restoring Documents
Ludivine Leroy-Banti (National Archives of France) and Manon Van Hooydonck (Provincial Archives of Ille-et-Vilaine, France)
— Online presentation in English
11am Technological Obsolescence in Contemporary Art: Conservation and Restoration Intervention on the Artwork Radiologias (1979), by Silvestre Pestana
Francisca Carneiro de Brito de Lafuente (School of Arts, Universidad Católica Portuguesa de Oporto, Portugal) and Joana Cristina Moreira (the CITAR Research Centre for Science and Technology in the Arts and the School of Arts, Universidad Católica Portuguesa de Oporto, Portugal)
—Presented by: Francisca Carneiro de Brito de Lafuente
Presentation in English
11:30am Coffee break
12:15pm Strategies of Production and Conservation Applied to Ephemeral Installations Built with Soil: Delcy Morelos’s Profundis in CAAC
Ana Posada Baraldés and Manuel Cid Medrano (artists and researchers from the Fine Arts Department at the University of Seville), Alice Borsani (graduate in the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage from the University of Seville), José Carlos Roldán Saborido (conservator-restorer from the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo) and María Arjonilla Álvarez (professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts’ Painting Department at the University of Seville)
—Presented by: Ana Posada Baraldés, Manuel Cid Medrano and Alice Borsani
12:45pm Predictive Conservation and New Technologies as a Tool in the Conservation and Restoration of Contemporary Art
André Maragno (conservator-restorer of contemporary art, Brazil)
—Online presentation in English
1:15pm The Model of the Yhyakh Festival of Sakha by Fedor Markov: Navigating the Conservation of an Ethno-Contemporary work
Alicia de la Serna (British Museum, London)
1:45pm Final Note and Conclusion
Submitting proposals (closed)
The deadline for presenting proposals ends on 13 October 2024. Those interested must send an email to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es , submitting the following documents:
- An unpublished proposal related to the conservation or restoration of contemporary art.
- A 1,700-word summary, written in Word, on the theme addressed. Please indicate the topic at the top of the document with five keywords and the presentation format (in-person or virtual).
- CV and contact details.
Proposals may be submitted in Spanish and English and will be evaluated by a Scientific Committee, which will select the submissions to be presented during these conferences and will determine their possible participation in a subsequent publication, the inclusion of which will undergo a second and definitive evaluation by the Editorial Committee.
For submissions in a virtual format, participants must send a recording following certain technical requirements they will receive once participation is confirmed.
Más actividades
Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.
A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.
Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge
26 MAY 2026
Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge, will speak with Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a session dedicated to exploring the interpretive frameworks of this first large-scalepresentation in Madrid of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose practice continues to resonate in the present.
The conversation begins with the exhibition’s title itself, Sweet Revenge, understood as a paradoxical notion that articulates much of the artist’s thinking. From there, the tensions running through his work are explored: the coexistence of opposing registers, ambiguity as a method, and the simultaneously affective and political charge of his works.
The dialogue also touches on some of the themes that run through his body of work, such as thenotions of identity, citizenship, and authority, alongside experiences linked to the AIDS crisis, and emotions such as love, loss, grief, and optimism. Special attention is given to the way in which Gonzalez-Torres shifts languages associated with Arte Povera, conceptualism, and minimalism towards open, participatory, and deeply personal structures.
The session also includes a reflection on the research process that shaped the exhibition, providing context for the curatorial decisions and criteria that structure it. In this context, Gonzalez-Torres’s work emerges as a device that actively engages those who activate orinterpret it, distributing responsibility for the production of meaning—a process that is alwaysunstable and constantly under negotiation.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.