ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how technical conservators use scientific expertise, technologies and materials to understand, modify and arrest deterioration and decay. Focusing on material transformation close-up, we explore how they intervene in the vital and dynamic assemblages of materials and agencies that make up historic buildings and monuments. Deploying multi-sensory, “tactile knowing”, technical conservators “tinker” with scientific techniques and tools in a skilful fashion, marshalling recalcitrant materials to keep “the thing itself” in being. We show that this involves meticulous boundary work informing the assembly and reassembly of materials, delineating the object of conservation in space and time while respecting the “look of age”. If conservation practice creates a space in which the multiplicity and instability of the object of conservation is exposed and negotiated, then the question “what to do?” is an ethical and political one. Whilst much of the literature renders decay as either productive or problematic, we attend to the more situated questions of how, when and in what ways it is “good” or “bad” to intervene.
