Professor of Sociology at La Sapienza University - Rome

How do you imagine restoration work?

A few unsettling questions. Does restoration conserve its own civil and salvific aura, in its automatic grammatical and syntactic and relational declinations? What does the verb “restore” say to a sensitivity that is not very developed when it comes to questions of art? And the adjective “restored”?
Something that has been imposed once again? Something that was broken and instead now artificially masks its not having stood the test of time? Something that has survived to arbitrarily permeate the “not yet” rather than the “no longer”? And then: restoration, its semantic sphere, what system of references and hierarchies does it trigger in the imagination? Is it a dimension that is necessary for every place and object of daily life or those items that society has decided to reward, to organise vertically to show off? What is it that is not said about the restoration of items that shine as much as others that are cast into the darkness? Why does science fiction show in its post-historical scenarios only ruins or syncretic reconstructions or deserts? Why is restoration concealed by ideological sharing, while on the other hand moral disapproval and ethical prohibitions spring forth regarding a woman who undergoes cosmetic surgery to return to her former beauty and biotechnologies that transform the human body? And so: must restoration be numbered among the techniques that fly in the face of nature or among the techniques that preserve it? Of the techniques that destroy or perpetuate memory? What is the subjectivity that is expressed in the artifices of restoration and what is the subjectivity to which this is offered?
The word “restoration” is conventionally evoked following another word, decidedly less pleasant: “conservation” (which is closely connected with mummies, refrigerators,
the terror that time corrupts, change dissolves, desire burns, and that death annihilates the assumed and prearranged difference between human beings and everything else in the in world). That a maintenance culture is missing in Italy (adjusting the things that do not work for the needs and wishes of everybody) and instead that of restoration triumphs says it all. It tells us that the Italian culture is, more than others, divided, split between everyday experience to be lived and bygone life to be honoured (or perhaps between consumption and accumulation, the person and the identity). Nevertheless in this excess of life left to itself it seems to me that a crack is opening – an eruption, a creative abscess – that tends on the other hand to be lacking in the national contexts where restoration and maintenance are part of a single robust sense of civilisation and the civilising process. It is into this crack that we must look.
The vocation (sensitivity, occupations, cultural policies) of the restoration puts at risk, or can put at risk, the theories and practices of conservation. However bound it is to
them, as a vocation necessary for giving a sense to conserving and to conserving the conserved, it has a sign of autonomy in the design and practical work that is imposed
on it: intervening on objects and so each time having to know how to choose between copying and creating, repeating and innovating. Or – for example, but just to describe
the virtually-unconventional decision making importance of the restoration – knowing how to decide between making sacred and desecrating, closing or opening, binding or freeing.
Including or expelling. And to decide it is necessary to have a sensitivity in contrast with the ideology of restoration: separating rather than recomposing.
Restoration in the common sense of institutions is not a magic word. It is in the religious spirit of the churches of god and the sovereign. It is crammed full of individual and collective, anthropological and social mythomanias towards the past and the truth, history and its canons (ethical, aesthetical and political). But it does not have an innovative, “fabricating”, poietic interiority. It is an important, “right”, term in the lexicons of the cultures of production and their vocation against fashions and Consumption. The contents that have enlivened the traditions of restoration
have almost always gone against risk, gambling, raising the stakes and the luxury of destruction. My point of view is of course radical.
I would have been able to couch these comments according to which restoration is a technique of enhancement of historical and artistic assets that are on the market (works, monuments, quarters, cities, landscapes) and that, given their worldwide renown, attract economic resources and therefore (at least virtually) labour, profits and social development.
I would have been able to touch – inside the same economical and political train of thought – the relationship between costs and benefits in restoration strategies that
are called on to take care of an extremely costly heritage and therefore make itself compatible with the public interest.
But, looking at the situation from these points of view in order to dialogue with those who have dealt with them in an ever increasing number of specialised writings or with
those who have operated in many local, national and international cases, I believe that it is very important to place the restoration at the risk of creativity: not having the current vision of it, overcoming the basic stereotypes and the administrative or entrepreneurial routines of which it has almost always certainly suffered. Consigning it therefore to the magic of living rather than to instrumentalism – often empty rather than full of life that has been lived – of the canons of the institutions, markets and professions.

Alberto Abruzzese