Episode 049 Flaminia Fortunato

Show Notes

On this week’s show we continue expanding our perspective on the conservation field with contemporary art conservator Flaminia Fortunato. For the past two years Flaminia has served as the Stedelijk Museum’s first-ever time-based media art conservator, and prior to this held fellowships at MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, and more. In our chat we hear all about Flaminia’s origins growing up in the south of Italy, and her conservation education that began with very traditional roots in Venice, and expanded to the (at the time) only recently established field of contemporary art conservation, as well as scientific and analytical materials research. Tune in to hear Flaminia’s story!

Links from the conversation with Flaminia
> A Race Against Time: Preserving iOS App-Based Artworks https://resources.culturalheritage.org/emg-review/volume-6-2019-2020/heinen/

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Transcript 

[00:00:00] Ben: From Small Data Industries, this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben Fino-Radin, and on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past present and future of art and technology. This week, we are hanging out in the conservation lab. 

[00:00:16] Flaminia: My name is Flaminia Fortunato, and I'm a contemporary art conservator specialized in media conservation.

[00:00:23] Ben: At this point on the show, 49 episodes in, we have of course visited with quite a few conservators and in doing so we have placed pins all over the map, chatting with folks contributing to the conservation of time-based media art from Taiwan, Australia, Russia, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, Spain, Portugal, the USA, and today's chat with our guest Flaminia Fortunato expands our perspective of this international network, not only in the sense that she has built her career at museums all over the globe, including serving as the Stedelijk Museum's first ever time-based media conservator, where she's been for the past two years. But also because Flaminia's story begins in a place we haven't yet visited on the show in the south of Italy. I've long admired Flaminia's work as a conservator, she's done some incredible research into the realities of what it means for museums to collect emerging technologies, such as augmented reality and in hearing her story, you can see where the in-depth nature of her research approach comes from, her life in conservation begins behind the microscope in the world of scientific and analytical research of materials. I thoroughly enjoyed visiting with Flaminia and I am so thrilled to share our chat with you all this week. Before we dive in just a reminder that if you have been enjoying the show, leaving a review on whatever app you're listening to the show right now is deeply appreciated. It really helps other people discover the show. Thanks so much to all of you that have left such glowing reviews already, you are appreciated. And now without further delay, let's dive into this week's chat with Flaminia Fortunato. 

[00:02:02] Flaminia: Everything started in the south of Italy where I'm from. I come from a family who has a keen interest in politics, economics, fashion, and art, but mostly traditional art and we would travel and see museums. But I think my first understanding of art comes from my grandparents I like to define them at the intersection between craft and spirituality. During the aftermath of the second world war they had full time jobs to sustain their families, but they always had a second activity such as painting or carpentry and wood furniture, restoration tailoring and card reading. So I grew up also spending time with them, but particularly my grandfather whose name is Raffaele. In his second activity after his work was restoring, uh, wooden furniture for different families in my hometown. He would start collecting. Objects after work or from these families that maybe they were throwing away some of these objects and yet built on his terrace a small room filled with his collection, spanning from books, paintings, mirrors, jewelry, books. And when I was a kid, I would spend time in the afternoons, many afternoons just going through this. What I think retrospectively would be my first understanding of a museum, like a cabinet of wonder, because not only he had collected all of these objects, but every single object had a very specific story and he had also cared for them also as a restorer, not trained in restoration as we are now, but self thought so much. And he also cataloged everything and archived so beautifully. So I think this was perhaps my very like child memory of being connected to objects and material, culture, and history. 

So then there are however, two other remarkable experiences of being in a museum. And the first one was in Milan and I was with my big sister. I think I was already 15. And we went to see this exhibition. I don't remember the museum name or the type of curatorial practice and exhibition, but I do remember so vividly this video work by Sanja Iveković. It was this video work where she's drawing on her face arrows of black ink or makeup all towards her face and her neck. And of course this work started haunting me because it was so radical. It was the early works. I think it was around the early seventies where artists were also experimenting a lot with cameras and video and performance. And it was the first time that really, I saw a woman challenging the concept of makeup. And also the arrows were going around towards her mind. So it was really like rationality and intellect versus beauty altogether. Of course, I don't know if that is the interpretation, but for me when I was 15, I was like, wow. It gave me so much inspiration, also in a society such as Italy, that of course has a long history of patriarchy and patriarchalism. And it was such a, groundbreaking moment in my memory of, what art is actually.

In Italy you have a variety of specialization. So you can do classical studies, scientific study or language studies. And I decided to continue my secondary school in scientific specialization, but there was also a compulsory courses in philosophy. So I took of course, philosophy, Latin chemistry, math, but one woman that really completely changed my perception of architecture and art was my teacher. La professoressa Papa. She was always really elegant and telling amazing stories about art history and together with my teacher of m ath, I think they were the most important figures in my secondary school. So I became extremely fascinated in art and science. And after I finished my studies, I actually didn't know what I really wanted to do. This is a very crucial moment. When you are 18, you finish a big chapter in your life. And you're like, wow, what do I do? Who I want to become? There's like a very existential question. And I thought, perhaps architecture, would've been a very good option for me because, it has a lots of these components, but it wasn't until I stumbled upon this course in Venice called chemistry for restoration and conservation that I thought, oh, actually, this. This is my place. So I was going to Venice with my twin sister, trying to, you know, gather information on these classes. And I remember just switching off my phone because my parents were a little bit worried. I also wanted to have really a meditative moment to think through this. And I had a dream actually that I had to enroll in this chemistry for restoration program. And so the day after I just woke up and I went to enroll in this program and the first woman that I met, then would became a very good friend of mine. And we navigated our bachelor together, studying chemistry and mathematics, but also doing restoration of objects, but it was a very traditional program. So it was wooden sculpture or stone sculptures. And then there was this class, just one tiny module where a teacher would talk about contemporary art and the challenge that contemporary art was posing to conservation. And right after she mentioned this, I start Googling contemporary art conservation. And I discovered that there was this workshop in Portugal that was all about modern and contemporary painting. It was called loss in compensation, in contemporary painting. At that point I was also working and I just took the chance. And I, flew to Portugal and I attended this workshop and I met all these incredible painting conservators who were very fascinated by yeah contemporary paintings and how to approach the challenges that they had posed or they were posing. And it was a really interesting workshop. The teacher was Laura Fuster López, who is, um, a conservator and teacher in Valencia. Coming from the south of Italy, we go to the north of Italy because we grew up with this idea that the south of Italy is not much to offer and that the north is much more evolved. Education is more evolved. Infrastructure is more evolved, but actually I faced quite of the opposite. I was not really satisfied with my studies and the teachers were very self-centered and we had to learn so much of their research, but I think we didn't have a lot of freedom to do our own research at that point. I decided, well, I actually want to experience something else. I want to have the freedom to research the things I'm interested in because also in secondary school, I was always like really interested in not what the teacher was saying, but also like other books that were connected to that to look at other stories. And so I decided I really want to understand more about analytical chemistry because this is actually medium through which I can analyze contemporary art painting and research them. So there was a very good exchange program in Europe. We have the Erasmus exchange program. So every university is connected and you can choose to go in another place and study. And so Finland actually, the university of Helsinki, had a really good program in analytical chemistry. So I just decided to go, I received funding from European union and went there, but it was January in Finland. There were maybe minus 25 degrees, there were only two hours of light a day. And was studying this crazy, highly scientific subject. And all of a sudden one day I had this moment of like, Oh, in Portugal. I met this incredible lady. She was a painting conservator in Helsinki. I'm going to write her an email. And I literally just wrote her an email and said hi Tuulikki Kilpinen, that's her name, she's this wonderful lady who had a private practice in painting conservation. And I just kindly asked, could I just meet you for a coffee and a piece of cake and could I potentially maybe be your intern? And then she was really happy that I contacted her. She even remembered me from this workshop in Portugal and she just opened the doors of her atelier to me, and we would restore painting next to each other, having this beautiful lunch, talk about conservation. And at the same time I was doing this research project at the analytical chemistry department so for me, it was this incredible mix of science and art, but at the same time, I felt for me, those moments in this little atelier restoring paintings, were so significant. It was just a fantastic moment to realize, okay. While I like science, I don't think I actually fit the category of scientist. It was this moment of being in between. And soon after Finland, I moved to Brussels because I received another European funding for a internship. And it was at the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage in Brussels. It's a federal institution that basically care for the cultural heritage of Belgium. They have architecture, they have painting paper photography, and also a newly born contemporary art conservation. However, I did start in the architecture conservation and I was like analyzing different stones and different, uh, reaction to salts in stones and what was the interaction of degradation and so on. And then one day I realized that in front of my office, there was this amazing door to another office called the office of contemporary art scientific research. And I literally knocked the door and said, hi, good morning, everyone. I don't know what is your name? I work just in the architecture one, but I would love to be your intern and just shift my internship. And they were like, oh, actually it's the first time that someone is asking us something like that. You know, it was a very newly formed department and, Wim Fremout who then would become my co-advisor for my bachelor thesis was very helpful in trying to get all the papers prepared for my transition. A lot of my training actually had come from knocking doors. In Italy there was no training, no standardized training for contemporary art. And I was so curious and I didn't know who could nourish my curiosity. 

[00:15:01] Ben: Yeah, it's fascinating a way your upbringing and your early career is almost tracking the evolution of the conservation field in the sense that like conservation writ-large in some ways is, born out of Venice. But then contemporary art conservation, which is of course different, these people who you were interning with in many ways, I would imagine are the first generation of contemporary art conservators since that had only really begun to emerge in the nineties. So you came up where the field writ large developed, and then you had these internships when that field of contemporary art conservation was just really cemented, and growing for the first time in a way.

[00:15:45] Flaminia: Right, and I also think that, the initial prolific time of contemporary art conservation was like how to merge science and conservation together because there was so many undiscovered areas of material degradation. So my experience in Brussel was I worked with a lot of conservation scientists before actually deciding I want to be an active player in the history of conservation in the history of cultural heritage preservation and care. I want to be a caretaker. I don't want to analyze only samples. Of course, I find it, the microscopic realm, so fascinating, but in the process of analyzing all these micro samples, I was losing the oversight of the macrocosm. And I wanted also from studying philosophy, I wanted to have an holistic approach to objects, to material culture, and also understanding the roles that we have in the history of human culture. It was, um, a turning point, I think, because after an analyzing one specific painting by Magritte. I met this other painting conservator, and then I was like, yes, I had it clear in my mind. I want to be a conservator. I was on internet and trying to like use a very specific keyword. Okay. Contemporary conservation, cause I wanted to understand how I could further my education. And then I found Kate Lewis and then Christine Frohnert and the Bern program and the Northumbria University in the north of England. And then when I actually saw the first page of the Bern university of the arts in Switzerland, I just saw a picture of their laboratory. I had this very emotional intuition. I don't how to call it, but I just had this moment of yeah, this is going to be my program this is the place where I want to be. And I applied for both programs. I got in both and in between, I actually flew to Bern and I wanted to actually meet people. As you probably have noticed from my storytelling, a lot of this has to do with meeting people and talking to them and knocking doors and just trying to trace my little path in this very cloudy, messy field that, that I didn't know what it was or what it would become my career, my path and my passion, but I was just trying to find a little, little ways. And I met there Anna Comiotto and then Agathe Jarczyk who then would become my mentor during my master program and I was amazed by the school, entering the school and seeing artworks of Mona Hatoum on the ceiling and their atelier was incredible just to seeing their infrastructure coming from Italy and seeing that I was like, mind blown. It was a almost like an industrial building. So a lots of concrete, it was slightly outside of the city center. And there were all of these Macintosh computers and incredible little library and then the second floor every atelier so painting sculpture, MMM which is modern materials and media was the one where I first entered. And I remember this lovely lady with this incredible aura, which is Agathe. She opened the door and I just remember all of these monitors and these tapes and all these electronics and the plugs and cables, it was this incredible world. And she was like, hi, I'm a media conservator and I teach here. It was the first time that I just realized, oh, as part of the contemporary art conservation training, there is this media conservation training and just the enthusiasm for it. I was just amazed and I still don't know which word to use to describe this, um, passion that she conveyed to the students and their curiosity. You know, my first project was analyzing a DVD. And, just holding a DVD I never thought that actually was also an artwork. And it was just this incredible moment of I think learning time based media as a kid in the age of why I was just asking so many questions all the time and she was always so open to analyze things, to look at it together, to problem solve, but also to have this approach towards ethics and all of a sudden, I just realized that was more and more the field I was extending towards with my curiosity and reading, and then she had this incredible idea. I told her that I was extremely fascinated in research and doing more research and Joanna Phillips at that point there was a collaboration between the university of the arts and the Guggenheim that, Agathe and Joanna put together to respond to our curiosity for research and together with my colleague Sophie Bunz and another colleague from the program. We collaborated with Brian Castriota on video codecs and this was my first research project that I think to this point had finally met my expectation that I had tried to find since I was a kid in my hometown of what it actually means to do research. Also to hear Agathe and Joanna talking about the challenges of the field, how it was affecting the museum world. And I think that was the moment where I realized the theory and practice can merge so well together. Whereas before that, I think a lots of research, you are just a little tiny tessera in a mosaic when you do very scientific, deep analysis of, for example, a sample because there is so much more and research, it can last five, 10 years just to find out something. Whereas with this research, I felt that the goal was much more approachable and we were learning so much. We were learning so much about different softwares and different playback devices and analytical tools. And it was just really scratching the surface and going a level deeper every time we were meeting. So it was this fantastic experience. And, the school provided Agathe with an amazing support. So she brought all of us to Tech Focus in New York city. And it was at this conference that all of a sudden I realized, yeah, I just want to be a media conservator. I felt like these are my peers. these are the people I'd like to get to know. And it was such a remarkable moment. The second moment actually was when I was home and we were playing back a family video that my father had asked a small company to digitized. I was still studying and I just remember we were all like in front of this projector and looking at this video, and all of a sudden there was this huge artifact because the video was so badly digitized and basically I remember exactly that moment when I was a kid with whom I was talking and my grandmother there. So in my memory, I had this vivid resemblance of what that was, but then the video had basically, uh, erase this memory and I just realized, oh, if you don't do things in the right way, It's a loss of memory and it had never occurred to me that I can have such a big impact on humans. So it was this very personal histories that were intermingled with much professional experiences that brought me to this field of having an active role in memory and perpetuating memory, I think. 

[00:24:51] Ben: Yeah. As you alluded to, you kind of went on this epic tour of institutions all over the world, doing fellowships and internships. For instance, the Hirshhorn, the MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, a couple of those being year long fellowships that just must have been such an incredible learning experience. Especially because those are very different institutions, they all have their own cultures. They're very different sizes. They have different resources. They're in very different places in terms of the evolution of their conservation programs. So I'm curious, you know, are there any standout memories or big like lessons learned from that period of time? 

[00:25:32] Flaminia: Hmm. Well, as I was saying earlier knocking the door and researching online has been a really important, as they say, in French, fil rouge, a red thread towards all of this path. And for me, mentorship has been the important guidance in my career. So for the Hirshhorn, I got to know Gwen Ryan's work from books and I was like, oh, but she's now working at Hirshhorn. I would like to be having her as a mentor. And I applied for the program. And then the same went with the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was this moment of oh, Kate Lewis Peter Oleksik Amy, and Ben Fino-Radin you are all there. Mentorship has been incredibly important and I mean, there were so many interesting little projects. One that stood out, is the wish tree by Yoko Ono it was this tree that was in the sculpture garden of the Hirshhorn museum. The public could take a piece of paper, write down a wish and attach it to the tree. And we were tasked with taking all these wishes every two weeks off the tree, reading them, cataloging them. It was a whole conceptual project. And, it was before the election of Donald Trump. And I just remember unwrapping and reading all these wishes, so many kids were also writing or teenagers and it was such a snapshot of an historical moment. And these wishes, it was almost like a word of wishes towards the United States. It was also the first time I was living in United States. So I think that was a really remarkable moment for me to work on this work. Then the second one I think, was interviewing artists with Brianna Feston-Brunet she has started a program of artists interviews, and I had interviewed artists during my program, but this was the first time really witnessing artists in the exhibition space and interviewing them in front of their artwork that oral history aspect was very important also in the context of a museum, really, to understand how that works. And, MoMA, I learned so much because it was also a very prolific moment. My fellowship was part of the media conservation initiative. So within this five years program, there were three fellowship program, three peer forums, and four workshops organized on the theme of media conservation. And it was incredible to be able to be part of all this initiative, making a workshop, selecting people, being part of a team on top of all our activities at the museum. I think I learned so much just being exposed to what it means to really disseminate knowledge to institution that don't have the capacity or the resources to care for the collection, how many people can be empowered in the collective care of a collection? That was really fantastic learning curve. And then of course there were so many artworks that I've worked with the media conservation team, installing, restoring, documenting the collaboration and actually, how tight this team is. And everyone has this different interest. And at the same time there were all these weekly meetings and we were discussing things and really it was deeply and profoundly inspirational, to see how such a big institution works with so many talents and how you are being respected from day one, as a fellow, as an intern, we were all working towards the achievement of, I think a similar goal, which is making the art accessible for an incredible public. There was also really interesting project that MoMA, we were restoring the slot machine by Isa Genzken and being together with the sculpture conservator photography conservator myself, the three of us just restoring this piece. Of course I'm not an expert of slot machines. I would never be, but I found that this website, it was called the Freunde von Spielautomaten. And they had all this incredible information about how to read errors of slot machines. And because I was working on a collection work of MoMA and I wanted to interact with some of this friends of slot machines I invented my name as big queen casino, which was actually the name of the slot machine. So I was big queen casino right into this friends of slot machines to try to find out more about the error that I was seeing in the screen of the slot machine. And also just the simple thing of where is the battery of a slot machine, because at some point in history, in the history of production of a slot machine, there was also a battery of course they are electronics and they are computerized, but there is also a battery and the battery needed to be changed. It was another interesting deep curve into the world of electronics that I never thought about. I also realized that slot machines at some point are controlled by the casino where they stand because every month they print a sort of receipt with the number of cash in and cash out they have had so that you can't evade the taxes. I really enjoyed also the Brooklyn museum because it was a smaller scale. I was the first media conservator fellow in the team. And I just remember this incredible work that entered the collection. It was a Bill Viola work called Anima and I saw for the first time the Dave Jones DVD synchronizer in front of me, it was this legend, almost this haunting piece, like the Sanja Iveković piece that was haunting me. And I had dreamed of seeing it for real, and then it puff. It was the first day I was working there. Oh, there is a new donation and this is the work and I was like, wow, nobody could understand that I was almost crying in front of this historical piece. And they were like, is everything okay? And I was like, yeah I just had never seen something like that before. And I was explaining through what Lisa Bruno, the chief conservator of the Brooklyn museum said to me, the skill of analogy that I've also learned from the Bern program. I was just explaining video, like the difference between analog and digital to my conservator colleagues, by utilizing the analogy of paintings. And it was incredible to realize that all of them finally, from their eyes, they didn't even need to talk. They realized what I meant these moments of I called them awareness or realization or brightness. They are those moments that really are still my driving force. I think even today, when I see that other people from different fields really understand media conservation and its value, and it's not so abstract. So there were so many interesting projects that happened to be yeah. In my path of, professional slash fun, because I think there should always be a little bit of fun in our projects.

[00:34:11] Ben: Yeah. Wow. That is quite the collection of projects. So fast forward to today, you have now been at the Stedelijk for more than two and a half years as their very first full time, time based media conservator congratulations, first of all. 

[00:34:30] Flaminia: Thank you. 

[00:34:31] Ben: But , I'm so curious to hear how that's been going. Being the first time based media conservator anywhere I think must just be a huge challenge cuz there's a lot that hasn't been done over the years of course the Stedelijk does have a lot of time based media in its collection. Has there been a lot of catching up to do? And how have you been prioritizing like what you are going to take on, in all of that, because I'm sure there's just so much to do even still. 

[00:34:57] Flaminia: It has been a journey and a very exciting adventure. I think navigating a new culture, a new language. I now speak Dutch because the whole institution is run in Dutch language is very advised and preferred to speak Dutch. So all the meetings are in Dutch a new institution, a new role, and a new team. My predecessor Gert was the head of the audio visual team. And he had done actually a lot for the collection in his role. For example, the digitization of the collection of all the analog tapes in different waves of digitization building a storage infrastructure for the digital, assets. Documentation, actually, he would document a lots of exhibitions through video. So we have a huge amount of video, documentation of time based media artworks installed in the space. But for me the first two years have been a lot reorganizing all the documentation because there was a lot on paper, a lot digital, a lot of videos, and I'm still in the process of doing that, but I've created a new system for organizing every artist, every artwork and their documentation. And then I've done a survey of the collection to divide them in high, medium, and low priorities. With the idea of addressing slowly the high priority one and then the medium risk and then the low risk And on top of that I coordinate a team of two other people and then we have also a team of freelancers that work with us on exhibitions build. And my two colleagues, Jan Herman and Tjerk Busstra. They are specialized one in content management. So very knowledgeable on transcoding, infrastructure, server maintenance automation, and Jan Herman is specialized in exhibition building, exhibition design with audio visual material. So audio and video projectors, lenses, and from them, I've learned so much. Within this, we are part of the bigger team of conservation. So we work often with sculpture conservator, for example, neon works are part of our responsibilities. So often we work with them, especially also for bigger installations, for example, that have other elements. So paper conservator involved and painting conservators and metal conservator. So it's a very intense work because it's a lot about shifting gears, exhibition and then collection care and then research. But the first two years I've taken a big break from research because I needed to keep up with the Dutch language and just acquainting myself with the collection. And now I feel I'm a little bit more comfortable in our responsibilities and our team energy, because also I needed to create a new team. When a new person started in a new team it's a whole new ecosystem of sharing, understanding our skills and our knowledge and our weakness and our strength. So that has been also really, really a journey and is still going. But I feel that I believe so much in this chemical concept, or maybe it's more physical, but it's called osmosis. If you start sharing with other people and just being next to them, the way you look at things, the way you talk about things, you learn so much by being in the same ecosystem of action. I was really amazed when one of my colleagues started using the word integrity of artworks when we were talking about exhibition schedule and the exhibition of specific artworks and media installation and how we were trying to preserve the integrity of works, even if they were loans. And I think it was a very satisfying moment of realizing also language does so much in, our learning experience and our growth.

[00:39:46] Ben: For those who might not be intimately familiar with the Stedelijk's collection, could you perhaps share a bit about it? You mentioned that you did a bit of a collection survey and, establishing kind of like risk priorities for conservation work. So I would imagine, you know, the collection quite well at this point. 

[00:40:05] Flaminia: Um, So the Stedelijk Museum collection of time-based media has around 2000 media works that spans from single channel to multichannel video installation, software based works installation with dedicated equipment. Of course also neon works and the first works enter the collection in the seventies through the visionary work of Dorinne Mignot, who was a creator at the Stedelijk from 1974 to 2005. And she created really groundbreaking exhibition, such as Nam June Paik, Music Fluxus and Video and 79, the Luminance Image in 84, the Arts for Television in 87, John Jonas um, works in the nineties. And yeah, the collection has a lot of historical works by Vito Acconci, John Jonas, Ulrike Rosenbach, Michel Cardena. And also lots of works from artists that are based in the Netherlands. Steve McQueen, Fiona Tan, Nalini Malani. And, what I found it really incredible about the Stedelijk is that every two years. We have this exhibition called the Municipality Art Acquisition, the Gemeentelijke Kunstaankopen, and there are lots of young artists from across the Netherlands who can apply. And then there is a committee that selects the work, but every two years we have so many incredible artists that show their work and they are connected to the city or the Netherlands at large. Then there is also Prix de Rome, which is a prize in the Netherlands funded by the Mondrian funds and also is a competition between artists in their young mid-career. And I really love the diversity of age and cultural backgrounds and works that are being shown at the Stedelijk of course we also have big retrospective or solo exhibitions. We recently had the Hito Steyerl exhibition. We are preparing for the Anne Imhof exhibition and the team of curators is working on all these different projects and I work mostly with Karen Archey who is the contemporary art curator and time-based media curator and also curators of photography and contemporary art, less so with maybe design and decorative arts. The collection of the Stedelijk museum is the biggest in the Netherlands for time based media art. And it's a reference point for a lots of artists. When I talk to them also here in Amsterdam, they love going to the Stedelijk museum. It has done a lot of groundbreaking exhibition historically and, much more I hope to come with also new curators and yeah new ideas and changing times.

[00:43:19] Ben: In your career so far, you've worked in many different places. You've worked in numerous places in the US and in Europe and now, two and a half years in the Netherlands. I'm curious if you have experienced any kind of, discernible differences between how time-based media art conservation is approached, in different places?

[00:43:42] Flaminia: Yeah, I think it's a very good question. I think the differences are very much informed by different cultures. So I think there are different layers here. So there is the cultural layers where the institution is situated. Then there is the culture of the institution. How people work, how it's organized, what is the hierarchy? And then there is the third layer, which is what it means and how people work as a team and the concept of collaboration. And I, I do think that there are differences in scale and budgets, and that definitely impacts the way media art conservation is practiced and is activated. I think coming from New York City, which is a high demography of media conservators, and coming here where I feel, of course there is LIMA which is a very incredible organization. But also we are a little bit isolated in a way, in the sense that then there is UK and London specifically, then there is Bern and Zurich. So , it feels that the way in which you can easily have a chat in New York ask for. You know, lunch together to another conservator to have a conversation it's much easier in this smaller scale than how it is in Europe, where it's much more scattered and the practice and where we are is much more distant, and the way the collaboration can happen is a little bit different and manifests in different ways. So we collaborate a lot with Germany Christian and Johan, who I think are so fundamental for the field of media conservation in Europe. So I think that is mostly the differences in how it, is being approached in the Netherlands. also, There is a program, the UVA program, they do teach media conservation. And I'm trying also to build an internship program at the Stedelijk media conservation so I can train in a museum practice, young conservators and students into the field because I think there is a lot of need. There are a lot of collections that need more care but then of course, because of fundings because of resources, because of scale and because there is a big freelance community here, Actually much more than perhaps in New York. We rely so much on freelancers when we do exhibition for condition reports for treatment, and it's actually something that I had not seen in New York in the same way. I think probably that amongst all the cultural differences is probably a very big one. 

[00:46:52] Ben: So Something that I think is really interesting. Despite having grown up in such an art capital of the world Italy, you've spent almost your entire career in the us and in Europe. I'm curious why that is, are there collections of time-based media in Italy? I don't know too much about the ecosystem there.

[00:47:12] Flaminia: I actually don't know either. As I said, very early on in the interview, there was no educational path for me to follow in Italy. That's the reason why I left. I was also seeking to understand what research means, how you can be free to do your own research. And that actually didn't really happen in, in Italy. But it's very interesting at the same time, because if I look at the history of video art in Italy there is a lot, in the seventies, there was such a proliferation of production video center that were supporting so many artists like notoriously Art Video 22 by Maria Gloria Bicocchi who worked a lot with Bill Viola and so many like, Vasulka and so many incredible artists passed by this studio. And there were also another museum in Ferrara, a small part of the museum that was also producing lots of videos and video performances that was in Varese studio of Luciano Giaccari, where lots of media artists passed by. And so there was so much going on in the seventies, in Rome, there was the Attico and Obselisco galleries. So there is actually a specific history, also video art in Italy, but it didn't really last, very long. So in the eighties and nineties, all these little studios of production, making documentation, either morphed into something more commercial that was for television or they just imploded. And the Venice Biennial archive actually, which is incredible, has inherited some of these collections. There are people connecting to a university in Udine in the north part of Italy. One is Cosetta Saba who has also written a lots of books. Lisa Parodo also has contributed a lot to also digitizing these collections, and of course there are active media artists in Italy now, contemporary artists, for sure, but museums don't have media conservators on staff and a lot of contemporary art conservator are freelancers. So they have their private studio in private practice, and this university in Udine actually is very active, extremely active, but you need a big infrastructure to enable also your work, especially from analog to digital, I envision many collection haven't been fully digitized to actually start off a business in Italy. So it's uh, a crucial question for me actually, to understand what the opportunities are. If there would be some for myself and where those would be.

[00:50:19] Ben: So Flaminia we've taken this beautiful tour of your career so far but I'm curious, you know, what is coming next for you? Do you have any exciting projects in the works?

[00:50:30] Flaminia: I do. I am working on a very big exhibition by an Anne Imhof and it will be the first time also premiering avatar works, which are very new to her practice as a performance artist. So we are very excited uh it's going to open in October 1st, I'm also working with, an artist whose work recently entered our collection. Her name is Simnikiwe Buhlungu, and we are working on care on sharing our stories and concept of care for an upcoming conference. We've worked over a long period of time together and conversed on care and conservation. And we have decided to go a step further and, um, do a little project together for what care means to us. It's going to be at the conference called the Sustaining Art People Conservation and the Planet in Dundee, in Scotland, in November. So I'm actually very excited. I have to say I've taken a break from participating conferences and sharing my work, but I feel that there's a little bit of potential and beauty in also taking a meditative reflective pause and to think about what has happened and also what our role is and how is also changing as the collection and the works that are entered the collection are changing. The position of museums is changing towards their colonial history and their practice of seeking to decolonize their process, their methods, their way of looking at art and showing specific histories and how to revalue that and rebalance that back and how can we de-learn from what we've spent so much time learning history, specific ones and now I think it's also part of our role to think about what else and how can ours can be de-learned. I'm actually very happy that I stepped back from doing research. I really needed to rethink through a lot of aspects of my work. And the collection and our practice, how we interview artists, what type of knowledge information we are seeking. We really need to reconsider our knowledge and try to open up to other voices. 

[00:53:27] Ben: So I'm curious if you have any advice for folks that might be interested in getting into time-based media conservation?

[00:53:36] Flaminia: Really talk to people, see them go and see them go and see exhibitions, go to galleries, museums, underground spaces, look at a lot of art and look at how you think it was made. What is that? What is the work, why it is fascinating? I've learned so much by just going to museums, exhibitions. And then, try to get in touch with some people. Some museums now have their information there and talk to professors at different programs. Compare, trying to follow your intuition and what you think is the best fit for you because there isn't really one way to become a media conservator. There are so many different ways and also different programs now. And if you're fascinated by something, just take it apart safely. Hopefully. There's so much that you can learn also in that. And yes it's such a wonderful world and I love the word wonderful, because if you detach, it is full of wonder. And also the concept of a museum at the beginning was a cabinet of wonder. And I think that this word of cultural heritage conservation and care is a wondrous wonderful world. There is so much that I'm learning every day, even taking care of my yellow jumper that has a hole and mending it. That is a process of care. Even giving water to your neighbor's plant when they are out of their house. It's process of care, everything that has that empathy and enthusiasm and attention. And a little bit of poetry, I think too. And beauty can be considered a process, an action, a manifestation of care. And that's all we actually do also in media conservation. I really like this field if it's not clear enough. 

[00:55:47] Ben: It shows. 

[00:55:48] Flaminia: Yeah.

[00:55:49] Ben: Well, Flaminia Fortunato, thank you so much for your time and for sharing your story. It was just such a treat, to hear it all and to have you on the show. 

[00:55:58] Flaminia: Oh, thank you, Ben. It was really, really nice to talk about this and reconstruct the dots.

[00:56:05] Ben: And thank you, dear listener for joining me for this week's show as always, if you want to help support our work and mission of equitably compensating artists that come on the show, you can join us over at patreon.com/artobsolescence. Or if you are interested in making a one-time tax deductible gift through our fiscal sponsor at the New York Foundation for the Arts, you can do so at artandobsolescence.com/donate. There you can also find the full 49 episode backlog, including full transcripts and show notes. And last but not least, you can always find us on Twitter and Instagram @artobsolescence. Until next time have a great week. My friends, my name is Ben Fino-Radin, and this has been Art and Obsolescence.