AIC's 51st Annual Meeting

The paper will present the decision recently taken at the Heritage Conservation Centre (HCC) in Singapore to develop its new research strategy under the overarching theme of sustainability.

HCC is the centralised repository and conservation facility for the management and preservation of the 230,000+ works -ranging from maritime archaeology to visual and decorative arts - that constitute the National Collection (NC) of Singapore. Its team of 35+ conservators supports the exhibition program of the 8 main Singaporean cultural institutions. Until recently and despite the regional context and climatic conditions, the recommendations applied to care for the collection were the ones elaborated for institutions in temperate climates and accepted as best practice. Considering the current global climate crisis and the increased concerns raised by the museums regarding the energy consumption and costs associated to the current environmental set points, it was urgent to reconsider HCC’s care practices towards increasing its sustainability.

The paper will present the three directions of research currently developed at HCC under the overarching theme of increasing the sustainability of the institution and its functions. The definition of sustainability applied is the one proposed by Saunders (2022) in which five pillars -social, societal, economic, environmental and operational - are used. In such a model, the most desirable decision results ideally in having positive and optimal impact on the three first pillars while limiting to a maximum negative impact on the latter two.

The first direction of the research strategy focuses on the core function of HCC and aims to increase the sustainability of the applied Collections Care practices. The current effort to explore the use of a value-based method to implement a more sustainable storing and display strategy of the NC, especially considering the challenging regional climatic conditions, will be described. The system implemented since 2011 to classify the cultural value of the NC will be presented and the derived care decision framework applied at HCC described. It will be shown how this can help recontextualising the collection, developing its interpretation and increasing its cultural value.
The second direction of research focuses on investigating all possible means to increase safe access to NC while promoting its diversification to induce a shift in the discussion from “Access vs Preservation” dilemma towards “Useability as Sustainability” approach, as formulated by Nadal in 2021. Examples of using replica to present the work’s intended “functions” while respecting its material integrity and historical value will be shared. Uses of other collection surrogates, documentation and/or data that permit to increasing work’s cultural value will be mentioned.
The last research direction explores possible practices to ensure that HCC ‘s functions are sustained. Understanding HCC as an element of a larger professional ecosystem with roots connecting with the local network of private and public cultural agents in Singapore and branches reaching regionally and internationally, the benefits of using the model of permaculture to develop HCC’ s activity will be discussed along with its associated concepts such as interdependence, collaboration, circulation and integration.