Unruly Objects

The Denon wing of the Louvre contains some of the world's most famous masterpieces. Among them, at the top of the Daru staircase, the emblematic Victory of Samothrace dominates the room. Discovered in fragments in 1863, the 2,000-year-old sculpture underwent many restorations before being presented to the public in the form it is today. The conservation of works of art, whatever their nature, has always been a central issue for the museum world, and is constantly evolving. Anna Dumitriu explores contemporary issues related to the subject, and questions existing protocols; through her project Unruly Objects, she creates experimental objects that combine BioArt, history and blockchain technology.

Far from being the only one to consider those questions, the artist initiated her project after discussions with her long-time collaborators. Initially, Veroniki Korakidou, who collaborates with the Department of Antiquities and Works of Art at the University of West Attica in Athens, suggests to Anna that they should carry out the project together. She starts by researching conservation methods and processes, and then assembles a team of experts in conservation, microbiology, and archaeology, with whom she can share the fruits of her labour. During the conversations, Hélia Marçal (UCL) presents the notion of "unruly object", introduced in a publication by Fernando Dominguez Rubio; he defines the so-called docile objects, those that have a conservation protocol such as paintings or sculptures, and the others, called unruly. Anna then has the idea of creating BioArt objects, her speciality, dedicated to experimenting with different issues faced by conservators and ways of conserving them.

At the end of 2019, she obtains an a-n bursary fund to kick-start the project, and plans her trips to Athens, which she will cancel numerous times due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Eager to work with the team there, she postpones the meetings until 2021 and resigns herself to conduct them online, otherwise she risks her grant. In parallel to her meetings, she acquires pieces of marble which she learns to carve for the project. These have obviously been washed by sea water, a detail she sees as a nod to the Greek marble antiquities found at sea and whose conservation process she has already studied. Moreover, Anna can assume that marbles also develop a microbiome.

She refers to the comments of conservators to create the worst, or at least most problematic, specimens of conservable art. One of the scourges of conservation is holes, which are known to harbour bacteria and soil. These are seen as a danger, as they can also attract plants that can grow unpredictably and threaten to break the work. So Anna looks at artworks that have caused problems in the past (as detailed in the publication by Rubio), and examines the case of Eva Hesse: in the 1960s her sculptures were made of transparent, floppy latex, today they are yellow and brittle. Would she want her works to be exhibited in this way? The artist died young and has not made any statement on the subject, which brings us back to the artist's intention, a contemporary issue.

However, the question could have been asked long before, as the statues we contemplate in museums were also painted in the past. But today we have better tools to address these issues and ensure better conservation. Anna and her colleagues are looking at blockchain technology to address this; it is a digital database of linked blocks that is transparent, immutable, secure and decentralised. The idea would be to integrate an RFID tag into the objects (which works in the same way as our credit cards), which would refer to an NFT (non-fungible token, a unique and exclusive digital certificate of authenticity, derived from the blockchain) that would contain all the data linked to the work, including the creation process. Every ten years, the curator in charge of the work will have to create a new NFT with new data related to its conservation or restoration. The theory is currently being put into practice, and the idea has still to be tested.

So Anna drills a multitude of holes in her objects and thinks about how best to incorporate bacteria and RFID tags into them. For the latter, she chooses an old model for its aesthetics which remind her of the Antikythera mechanism; considered to be the first analogue computer dating back to at least 87 BC, it symbolises lost ancient knowledge. 2000 years later, the machine was discovered in a shipwreck in the Aegean Sea. The parts buried in the mud were preserved enough to allow us to understand the purpose of the object, and the rest decomposed. Anna has already reproduced a Winogradsky column for her project, which can also be seen as an allusion to the ancient mechanism; composed of earth, bark, newspaper, egg yolk and shell, plaster, and rainwater, it is covered and left to macerate, until the whole becomes a self-sustaining bacterial ecosystem in muddy form. While its initial aim is to study non-isolated bacteria, it shows us the importance of the balance of the microbiome in the conservation of materials.

Although fixed with resin in a dedicated, larger hole, the RFID tag is remotely reprogrammable. It is coated with agar jelly and then painted with mud from a Winogradsky column, and has finally been inoculated with SARS COV-2 RNA from a plasmid construct, as a form of biological timestamp for the project. The latter is a harmless reagent that was provided by the NIBSC. To make matters worse, Anna is adding cress seeds to the holes to encourage plant growth.

At the same time, the artist is in residence at the University of Surrey where she meets Simone Krings and Dr. Suzie Hingley-Wilson who are working on living latex; this fluid encapsulates cyanobacteria which have the property of capturing carbon, and therefore have a positive impact on the environment. As a result of her growing interest and as a tribute to Eva Hesse, Anna is also dedicating her objects to the experimentation of living latex, for which she is funded by the National Biofilm Innovation Centre.

She now has several series of unruly objects, one impregnated with living latex, and others with bacteria and seeds. The first series has three objects: one she keeps to repaint and add seeds to, another is co-conserved by Zoi Sakki and Athanasios Karabotsos at the University of West Attica University, and the last lives inside a Winogradsky column. This one has a wire so that Anna can fish it out whenever it needs to be exhibited. Once the mud has been scraped off, it seems to be the most intact object in the series. The artist is active when it comes to exhibiting Unruly Objects; the project has made an appearance at The North Wall Gallery in Oxford, Birmingham Dental Hospital’s Open Wide Gallery, and conducted a workshop at the V&A (alongside a pop-up exhibition) as part of the London Design Festival, during which hundreds of participants were able to create their own unruly marble objects.

With the objects now created and being tested, Anna can focus on the conservation of BioArt. With the financial support of Arts Council England, she is researching the reasons why museums are reluctant include it in their collections; currently in discussions with sympathetic curators at the ZKM, the V&A, and the Boerhaave Museum, it is clear that without a clear protocol, they will not know how to care for the works, a problem that Anna is seeking to address with the blockchain aspect of the project. She has also learnt to distinguish between conservation, which aims to protect the object and its story, and preservation, which is to maintain the object intact and static. However, the artist seems to think that there is also a fear associated with the term " BioArt " to which a possible solution would be simply to abandon the word itself but one she does not want to accept. In the meantime, she proposes the following alternative: to write a manifesto on how to collect BioArt objects, a result of her research and a long-term work that should be completed next year.

Anna Dumitriu has chosen one of the most docile mediums recognised by the museum world to make it unruly and undesirable.

With determination and boldness, she pushes the boundaries of conservation expertise to offer a relevant methodology for all bio-artworks.