INTERVIEW SERIES: The Living Archive: Conversations on Heritage, Memory, and Transformation INTERVIEWER: Gokhan Colak & Marie Green INTERVIEWEE: Hanna Hölling

Your work reconceptualizes conservation as a practice of care that extends beyond objects to encompass human and more-than-human worlds. What limitations of traditional conservation thinking led you toward this broader understanding of care?

Conservation has traditionally been understood as the preservation of objects against the effects of time. This approach has achieved remarkable things, but it rests on a powerful assumption: that conservation’s highest goal is material stability. Yet we increasingly encounter artworks, performances, landscapes, and ecosystems whose identities depend precisely on their capacity to change. In such cases, preserving material integrity alone, or following a scientific paradigm of “freezing” things in time, is no longer sufficient and may, in fact, contradict the very entity we are trying to preserve.

This led me to think of conservation less as fixing objects or maintaining predetermined “material conditions” and more as upholding the conditions of possibility for things to endure through—and not against—transformation. This does not mean simply standing by and watching things fall apart. Conservation becomes a form of informed accompaniment: drawing on the conservator’s technical, historical, and cultural knowledge of an object, artwork, environment, or practice to negotiate change in a considered and responsible way.

And this is where care becomes crucial. Care is not simply another word for preservation. It is an ethical practice of attentiveness, negotiation, and responsibility. It forces us to ask a more fundamental question: what—or whom—are we actually trying to continue? Sometimes the answer is an object. But it may equally be a community, a body of knowledge, a practice, an ecological process, or a memory. Who cares—and who holds the knowledge of how to care—is no less important a question. In my recent research, I have increasingly shifted this “who” toward holders of preservation knowledge who are not necessarily trained within Western academic traditions.

Seen this way, conservation becomes one of those rare fields capable of genuinely connecting the human and natural sciences. It also allows us to think across domains that have traditionally been kept apart: museums and ecosystems, archives and landscapes, artworks and living environments.

This is the newest strand of my research. I have begun to think about conservation transversally—moving from heritage grounded primarily in human histories toward living and changing worlds: glaciers, cultural landscapes, ecosystems, and land and environmental art. What interests me is what happens when conservation no longer begins by asking, “How do we keep things intact?” but instead asks, “What does it mean to care for things whose very condition questions our quest for permanence and continuity?”

The philosopher Bruno Latour challenged the separation of nature and culture, arguing that we inhabit networks of human and nonhuman actors. How has this perspective influenced your understanding of heritage and conservation?

Latour helped us recognize that the modern distinction between nature and culture is not simply given. In We Have Never Been Modern (1993), he describes this divide as part of the “modern Constitution”: modernity depends on acts of purification that separate humans from nonhumans, nature from society, even as its practices produce hybrids that cross those very divisions.

Heritage actively performs the separation Latour describes, not least because modern heritage institutions have historically reproduced the work of purification at several levels. To start with, heritage has been institutionally divided into cultural heritage and natural heritage. On one side are monuments, archaeological sites, artworks, buildings, archives and human traditions; on the other are landscapes, species, ecosystems and geological formations. Heterogeneous naturecultures have been sorted into administratively manageable categories.

Conservation does not simply inherit the purified object after heritage has constituted it. It exposes and works with the hybrids that classification conceals. Through a Latourian lens, it should first ask: what network of humans and nonhumans has been cut in order for this thing to appear as a discrete conservation object?

Again and again, heritage is never purely natural or purely cultural; it emerges through interactions between species, materials, technologies, environments, and their plural histories. Conservation shifts attention from objects alone to the many human and more-than-human actors that make heritage possible in the first place.

Conservation has often been associated with stability and preservation. Yet many contemporary artworks, environments, and ecological systems are defined by change. How should conservation respond to impermanence and transformation?

I often say that conservation should not be defined by permanence. It needs to move beyond the idea that its primary task is to keep things intact indefinitely. Change is not necessarily the enemy of conservation; it can be part of what conservation seeks to understand, negotiate, and correspond with.

Many contemporary artists deliberately work with materials and processes that decay, transform, are short-lived, or eventually disappear. Ecological systems, likewise, are inherently dynamic: they grow, adapt, deteriorate, regenerate, and transform. Trying to arrest these processes, or to restore one particular moment in their existence, can sometimes undermine the very qualities and values we are trying to care for.

So I think the question needs to shift. Rather than asking only how we can prevent change—which conservation has theorized and practised with enormous sophistication—we need to ask: Which changes matter? Which transformations can be accommodated or even supported? And which threaten the identity or continuity of what we are trying to uphold?

This makes conservation a more adaptive and responsive practice. Documentation, maintenance, monitoring, dialogue, and ongoing decision-making may become as important as material intervention or restoration. Conservation, in this sense, is not about defeating time but about learning how to work with it.

Impermanence, whether entropic or intentionally programmed into a work, is not a failure of conservation but a condition conservation must learn to engage. It demands forms of care capable of negotiating decay, transformation, and loss, recognising time itself as constitutive of what we seek to sustain.

Your research explores glaciers, infrastructures, and hybrid heritage forms as sites where art, science, and ecology converge. What can these sites teach us about the future of cultural and environmental stewardship?

These sites make visible something that has always been the case but that climate change renders increasingly impossible to ignore: cultural and natural heritage cannot really be separated. Glaciers, for example, are physical environments and climate indicators, but they are also scientific archives, cultural landscapes, sacred places, tourist destinations, artistic subjects, archaeological sites and repositories of memory. Their retreat is therefore never simply an environmental event. It raises cultural, ethical, political, and ultimately conservation questions: What exactly are we trying to preserve, for whom, and at what cost?

What interests me about these hybrid sites—glaciers, but also environmental artworks and cultural landscapes—is precisely that they unsettle the division between nature and culture that has shaped many of our institutions and conservation practices. Climate change makes that separation increasingly untenable. We cannot care for cultural heritage without attending to the environments in which it exists, just as environmental stewardship cannot be separated from the histories, communities, technologies, and cultural values.

For me, this means that the future of stewardship cannot belong to any single discipline or professional authority. It has to emerge through encounters between different forms of knowledge and practice—among artists, scientists, conservators, local communities, Indigenous knowledge holders, and others who live with and care for these places. Stewardship must involve learning how to care for interconnected worlds whose cultural, ecological, and material futures are inseparable.

Critical heritage scholars increasingly argue that heritage is not simply inherited from the past but actively produced in the present. How does this shift affect the way we imagine heritage futures?

As scholars such as Laurajane Smith, Rodney Harrison, Caitlin DeSilvey, Sharon Macdonald, and Cornelius Holtorf have argued, heritage is not simply inherited from the past but actively selected, produced, and negotiated in the present. Heritage practices therefore do more than preserve the past: they shape the present while making particular futures possible.

Conservation plays a crucial part in this process (although, to be sure, not everything conserved is heritage and not all heritage becomes an object of conservation). If heritage makes claims about what should cross time, conservation negotiates how—and under what conditions—that crossing can take place.

Every conservation decision is therefore also a decision about the future. We are not merely safeguarding the past; we are helping determine what is recognised and valued in the present, what will endure, and in what form.

Thinking of heritage as something produced rather than simply inherited also raises the question of who has the authority to produce it. Communities historically excluded from official heritage narratives increasingly claim a role in deciding what counts as heritage, what deserves care, and whose knowledge and values should guide that care. These are questions we are exploring in our research project Critical Conservation (SNSF 2026–2030).

Heritage futures are therefore not predetermined; they are collectively made. They depend as much on imagination as on expertise, asking not only what we want to carry forward, but what kinds of worlds we want that inheritance to maintain. In an age of climate change and profound ecological and social transformation, these questions are no longer optional—they are urgent.

Much of your work engages with the concept of “naturecultures.” What does this framework reveal that conventional distinctions between nature and culture often conceal?

The concept of naturecultures, associated most prominently with Donna Haraway—although what it describes has long been lived and understood by many communities around the world—challenges the assumption that nature and culture exist as separate realms. They do not simply influence one another; they are co-constituted. Nature is already entangled with human histories, technologies, economies, and forms of knowledge, just as culture is inseparable from biological, material, and ecological processes.

What the conventional distinction conceals, then, are the relations that make worlds possible—and the histories and power structures embedded in those relations. A forest may appear “natural,” but it is also shaped by generations of management, extraction, habitation, legislation, and sometimes displacement. A glacier is a geological and climatic formation, but also a scientific archive, cultural landscape, tourist economy, sacred place, and increasingly an object of technological intervention. Even the museum, often imagined as a space protecting culture from nature, depends on—and continually negotiates with—humidity, microorganisms, materials, energy, and climate.

Thinking in terms of naturecultures therefore changes not only what we see but how we act. It complicates the idea that scientific expertise alone can determine what should be preserved and how. Scientific knowledge remains important in certain contexts, but it exists alongside artistic practices, local and Indigenous knowledges, historical experience, and other ways of knowing and caring for environments.

For me, naturecultures is therefore not simply a theoretical concept but a proposition for conservation. It asks us to shift attention from isolated objects and fixed categories to the relations and conditions that allow things to persist. Once we recognise that cultural, ecological, material, and social worlds are interdependent, conservation can no longer ask only, How do we preserve this object or place? It must also ask: What relationships sustain it? Whose knowledge defines its value? And what else is affected by our decision to preserve it? These questions are at the heart of our Natureculture Lab and my project Caring for Naturecultures at the Collegium Helveticum.

Environmental humanities frequently emphasize responsibility toward future generations. In your view, what obligations do cultural institutions have in the context of climate change and ecological crisis?

Museums and cultural institutions are in crisis, confronted by their colonial legacies, restitution debates, and an ethos of perpetual collecting and preservation, often for the benefit of relatively few. Today, they must also become places where societies confront and imagine uncertain futures.

This means reducing their own environmental impact, but their responsibility goes further. Cultural institutions can bring different forms of knowledge into dialogue, convene debates and create spaces for imagining alternative ways of living and caring. Climate change also challenges long-standing conservation assumptions. Maintaining every object under increasingly energy-intensive conditions may no longer be ethically or ecologically defensible. Institutions will need to rethink priorities and develop forms of care that hold cultural and ecological responsibilities together.

Climate change, then, is not simply an external threat to museums; it deepens an already profound institutional reckoning and changes the terms of their responsibility.

Donna Haraway has proposed the idea of “staying with the trouble” rather than seeking simple solutions to complex crises. How might this idea inform contemporary conservation practices?

Conservation has always dealt with complexity, uncertainty, and incomplete knowledge. Haraway’s “staying with the trouble” captures something conservators know well: there are rarely perfect or final solutions.

Conservation involves negotiating competing values, different stakeholders, and the consequences of every intervention. “Staying with the trouble” means remaining with these tensions rather than pretending they can ever be fully resolved.

It also requires humility. Conservation cannot control every process of change, particularly under conditions of climate crisis. Instead, it can cultivate attentiveness, dialogue, and long- term commitment. Care, in this sense, is not about solving problems once and for all, but about remaining responsive and responsible.

As digital technologies increasingly mediate our relationship with heritage, what opportunities and challenges do you see in preserving experiences, environments, and forms of knowledge that are inherently dynamic?

Digital technologies have transformed what conservation can do. We can document environments with extraordinary precision, reconstruct lost experiences, and make collections accessible across the world.

At the same time, digital media are themselves remarkably unstable: software becomes obsolete, formats disappear, and infrastructures require continuous maintenance. Preservation, in this context, is an ongoing commitment. More importantly, not everything meaningful can be captured digitally. Skills, performances, social interactions, sensory experiences, and ecological networks exceed documentation.

Digital representation or data are not equivalent to embodied experience or to knowledge embodied in a work or practice.

The greatest potential lies in using digital technologies to support rather than replace human engagement: to understand the changeability of works and practices, connect communities, expand access, and deepen participation. Heritage may increasingly live through digital systems, but it never lives through data alone.

You have written about care as a framework for rethinking conservation and heritage. In an age marked by ecological uncertainty, do you believe care can become a guiding principle not only for conservation, but for how societies imagine their futures?

Care offers a different way of imagining the future: one grounded in relationships that are empathetic and rational, cooperative and meaningful. It is not simply an attitude but a practice requiring attention, responsibility, negotiation, and the willingness to remain involved over time. Ecological uncertainty challenges the modern belief that we can fully control the future. Care offers another orientation: one based on connection and kinship—with one another, with materials and environments, and across generations.

For conservation, this might mean moving beyond object preservation toward sustaining the conditions that allow cultures and ecosystems to flourish. More broadly, it asks whether societies might measure success not only through growth and efficiency, but through the quality of the relationships and forms of coexistence they maintain. Care, then, is a way of making futures—and perhaps one of the most valuable forms of heritage we can pass on.