Attunement as an embodied methodology for conservation practices

Abstract

This article proposes attunement as an embodied methodology for conservation practices, grounded in relationality, intra-dependence and affective responsiveness. Borrowing from agential realism and posthumanist, queer, feminist, Indigenous, Black and anti-colonial scholarship, it critiques dominant conservation frameworks rooted in settler colonial and capitalist logics that prioritise extraction, certainty and control. In contrast, it explores how caring for artworks-as-cultural-heritage—and as emergent, indeterminate parts of the world—requires attentiveness and responsiveness to the ethical, political and affective dimensions of artworks and their extended material-discursive ecologies. Attunement is positioned as a practice of listening-with and allowing oneself to be stilled, reconfigured and mobilised toward more reciprocal and coalitional ways of knowing and doing. Recognising that the knowledge we produce is not neutral but intra-actively constituted through our methods, this article foregrounds attunement as a methodological counter to the epistemic violence enacted by extractivist, habituated and universalising conservation practices. It invites conservators to reckon with the inheritances and violences of colonialism and capitalism in their work—including around how knowledge is generated and recorded—and to imagine conservation as part of a broader practice of solidarity work, relational care and world-making.