Welcome to the APTCCARN6 Meeting in Bali, Indonesia. From 3 to 5 July 2023 APTCCARN, Institut Konservasi and the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation will gather together to reconnect again and share creative conservation initiatives and ‘learned’ practices drawn from the tropics. From museums and memory sites in Bali, Indonesia, we will bring together conservation and heritage professionals from the Indo-Pacific region with practitioners in Indonesia- including professional heritage and museum workers, artists, makers, knowledge holders, collectors - to engage, exchange and create conservation initiatives.

Our goal is to generate dialogues and participation to reflect on:

● Heritage and sustainable conservation: rethinking knowledge ecologies and their translation

● Why, whom and how tradition met modernity in the tropics

● Traditional & contemporary Balinese art: hierarchies of cultural creativity or creative knowledge ecologies for conservation?

● Reflections on collective creative initiatives, conservation practice and living heritage

These themes draw attention to why and what it means to maintain and care for material culture in the global south, with a focus on Bali, and notions of ‘heritage conservation’ in the geographies of former colonised people.

How long cultural records, cultural assets, and art lasts and approaches for their care, arguably differs across values, geographic place, timescales and knowledge systems. Conservation is principally shaped by the integrity of the cultural record and climate for collections, where ‘integrity’ and ‘climate’ are geographically and culturally contingent. Yet modernism and coloniality have drawn museums into conservation practices from the global north and modernist scientific principles, which are not always universally applicable, costly and exclusive. Moreover, they produce ambiguities and limited recognition of in-country expertise. Institutions, communities and materials conservation practices have thereby struggled with ‘a long-standing epistemological debate’ (Beebeejaun et al. 2013, p. 2) between knowledge and dominant positivist thought. What works in various geographical contexts is poised against an inherent tension between object centred and scientific processes, to those that are value based and socially situated alongside differences in institutional cultures, developmental histories and disciplinary leader’s foci.

It is these ideas that we wish to draw on. There are universal notions of heritage, those that have emerged out of the social experience and traditional knowledge, and those conservation actions that are deemed to be principally relevant in a situated place or organisation. It may assume that no one action is better than the other, or that discussions between the science method and traditional practices, or the global north and global south, are polarised. Our dialogue, however, does recognise 8 the experiential epistemologies with which conservation practice is grounded and those drawn from tropical climates in the global south. This is what brings us together. Finally, it acknowledges how marginalisation has informed global museology and conservation as Boaventura de Souza Santos’ (2014) calls epistemologies of the global south. Perhaps, for geographies outside the global north, cultural maintenance and materials conservation practices have followed their own trajectory and character (Tse et al. 2018).

For this reason, APTCCARN6 is purposely a face-to-face meeting. Panels, keynote and guest lectures are part of the program, but a focus is on the site visits, discussion panels and break out groups, for deeper dialogues to take place across 7 sites over 3 days. It will be shaped by the Indonesian museum partners and participants that make up over half the meeting, and the international participants from Australia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom and United States. We bring with us a range of experiences, from the professional and non-professional heritage sector. In particular, we welcome engagement with those new to heritage conservation and we applaud the commitment of the recently established Institut Konservasi in Indonesia. They signal a sustainable future for conservation and collective leadership in Indonesia. In all, our experiential epistemologies may be shared or differ, but principally will be based on our challenge led experiences and respective knowledge ecologies that have emerged out of conservation practice in the tropics.

APTCCARN6 celebrates sustainability and the socialisation of cultural materials conservation in the tropics with visits to 7 sites to represent various heritage approaches in Bali.

The Emergence of APTCCARN

APTCCARN6 is our sixth meeting (APTCCARN 2023). Since the Asia Pacific Tropical Climate Conservation Art Research Network’s (APTCCARN) inauguration in 2008 at the Balai Visual Negara then Balai Seni Lukis Negara (National Art Gallery), we have held meetings at the University of Melbourne in Australia, Silpakorn University in Thailand, Cheng Shiu University in Taiwan, and with the National Museum of the Philippines on the island of Bohol, in the Philippines. When APTCCARN was inaugurated at Balai Visual Negara, then Balai Seni Lukis Negara (National Art Gallery), it focussed on the theme of ‘20th Century Art Conservation Research’. By 2009, an ‘Online web portals for Art Conservation and Curatorial Research’ was hosted at the University of Melbourne, which garnered impetus for ‘The Conservation of Material Culture in Tropical Climates: The 3rd APTCCARN Meeting’ at Silpakorn University, Thailand in 2012 to claim a focus on materials conservation in the region in its own right; and then ‘Embracing Cultural Materials Conservation in the Tropics: The 4th APTCCCARN Meeting’ at Cheng Shiu University in Taiwan in 2015. In 2017, following a number of extreme natural disasters affecting cultural heritage, 'Natural disasters and cultural heritage in the Philippines: Knowledge sharing, decision making and conservation', was co-hosted with the National Museum of the Philippines to share responses, recovery and conservation actions in a region that is facing unpredictable, uncertain events and the dynamics of change at different scales. As a network first established to support a geographically focused practice of cultural materials conservation in the Asia Pacific, it has since evolved in 15 years as an emerging discipline.

These APTCCARN Meeting themes may mirror the tension between a material-based approach to a dialogic and socially situated examination of cultural materials conservation. The chronology of meetings first acknowledged a point of difference in the practice of cultural materials conservation in the region, which required a translation of decision- making frameworks grounded in regional relevant research. Quite simple discussions on the longevity of materials in hot and humid climates and the climate controls in museums in the region, were discussed. Such persistent discussions were not so different from those raised by OP Agrawal in the 1970s (Agrawal 1975) and SEAMEO SPAFA’s platform on Heritage & Conservation: Conservation in the Tropics (SEAMEO SPAFA 2014). From a materials science conservation perspective, clearly there were few scholarly studies on the risks to objects and their rates of decay, while discussions on perceptions of material lifetimes, representation, cultural rights and social experiences evolved.

The APTCCARN6 Committee is delighted to partner with Institut Konservasi. Saiful Bakhri, Lia Sumichan, Laila Nurul Fitrani and Gadis F. Putri, as the local organising committee, have been working up to this event and putting the cultural and practical logistics into place together with Diana Tay in Singapore and Seka Seneviratne in Melbourne. This is not only recently but long before when they first came to cultural materials conservation many years ago. It is their experiential knowledge drawn from challenge-led conservation practices in Indonesia which has led to APTCCARN6. Further hosting an international event like this takes commitment, attention to detail and cross cultural knowledge, and we deeply thank them. We thank Abi Kusno of the Balai Pelestarian Kebudayaan Wilayah XV, and staff for his opening lecture and engaging vision of cultural heritage in Bali. From the Tampaksiring Presidential Palace and Tirta Empul Temple, we thank for her warm welcome. Our partnership with Museum Puri Lukisan, is supporting our first dinner reception and we particularly thank Tjokorda Bagus Astika and Susanne Erhards for sharing her experiences at the Museum Pasifika. At Cush Cush Gallery, we thank Suriawati Qiu for her lecture on traditional Balinese art making while we participated in the natural colour making workshop. Finally we thank the Saka Museum at the Ayana Estate, a major sponsor of APTCCARN6, where the final panels and closing reception will be held. In particular we thank Ms. Alvita Chen and the Suliawan Family. Thank you to all the participants and panel contributors and chairs. We look forward to the sharing of knowledge and future exchanges.

References

Agrawal, Om Prakash 1975, ‘An Asian view of conservation’, Museum, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 157 – 160. APTCCARN 2023, ‘Asia Pacific Tropical Climate Art Research Network’, viewed 10 June 2023, .

Beebeejaun, Y, Durose, C, Rees, J, Richardson, J and Richardson, L 2013, ‘Beyond text’: Exploring ethos and method in co-producing research with communities’, Community Development Journal, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 37-53.

de Souza Santos, B, 2014, Epistemologies of the South, justice against the epistemicide, Routledge, London.

SEAMEO SPAFA 2014, ‘Heritage & conservation: conservation in the tropics’, viewed 5 August 2018. http://www.seameo-spafa.org/heritage-conservation/.

Tse, N, Labrador, A, Scott, M & Balarbar, R 2018, ‘Preventive conservation: people, objects, place and time in the Philippines’, Studies in Conservation, no. 63, 1, pp. 274 – 281. doi. 10.1080/00393630.2018.1476963.