Full transcript for the April 2025 conservation with Pil Rasmussen and Nina Quabeck

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Summary

In this episode of Conversations with Change Makers, Yadin Larochette discusses how large museums have adapted their climate control and evolved using sustainability with the conservation leaders at the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. They discuss what models they used, how they made progressive changes, and what setbacks and challenges they face. This conversation features positive outcomes with a focus on teamwork, team building and advice for any conservators looking to make change.

0:01 Opening Remarks 2:08 Introduction 04:12 Introduction to and History of the SMK 06:50 Navigating ‘Sustainability’ 12:32 The ‘Danish model’ and climate control 15:50 Barriers to making changes at SMK 22:46 Moving Forward for the SMK 25:05 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Background 27:22 How the KN-W tackled climate control 36:56 Learning Opportunities 39:02 Discussion 50:15 Q&A 53:55 Closing Remarks


  • Please note that transcript has been edited for legibility *

(0:01 Opening Remarks)

Yadin Larochette: Okay it's one minute past the hour and I want to make sure we have time for any questions that come up at the end so I'll start while people log on.

Hi everyone. On behalf of the American Institute for Conservation Sustainability Committee, thank you for joining us. This is our 10th of our Conversations with Changemakers in which we're addressing the environmental impact of the buildings in which cultural heritage is stored, exhibited, and studied. I'm Yadin Larochette, co-chair of the committee. Fellow sustainability committee member Amy Crist is with us today monitoring the chat and Nick Farrell from AIC is facilitating the Zoom webinar platform.

Today we have Pil Rasmussen, director of conservation at the SMK National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen, and Nina Quabeck head of conservation at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. I hope I did not just completely butcher that- in Dusseldorf. Here today, to discuss steps they've taken at their respective institutions to spearhead the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions via HVAC shutdowns, environmental parameter expansions, and other energy efficient solutions.

And before we start we have some general housekeeping: please enter your questions into the Q&A, not the chat, so it's easier for us to track. And feel free to comment on the questions and upvote questions that are important to you. Please do not raise your hand as that will just cause us more confusion, and if we run out of time for any of the questions we will get them answered after the webinar and post them on our wiki. Please only use the chat to share the links and reactions. The caption is enabled, the recording, excuse me, the event will be recorded and Nick will then post it onto the AIC YouTube channel within the next couple of weeks, and we will also have the webinar transcribed.

(2:08 Introduction)

So I'd like to introduce the two speakers. So, as I mentioned, Pil Rasmussen is the director of conservation at the SMK National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen, originally trained as a paintings conservator at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts; she worked for a number of years in Denmark's Louisiana Museum of Modern Art before joining the SMK in 2012. She has been leading SMK's conservation department since receiving a master's degree in the psychology of organizations, an MPO, from the Roskilde University in 2017. Driven to find sustainable solutions she has been spearheading multiple initiatives within her institution and beyond.

Dr. Nina Quabeck is head of conservation at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, another opportunity to destroy the name of the region- I'm currently in actually too- I'm just up the road from her currently in Dusseldorf, Germany. She studied paper conservation at the Camberwell College of Arts in London and has devoted herself to the conservation of modern and contemporary art at the Kunstsammlung since 2003. With small interruptions in 2007-2008 she was a Samuel H. Kress Fellow at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which is where I initially met her, and from 2016 to 2018 she was a PhD candidate in the EU research project ‘New Approaches in the Conservation and Contemporary Art’ at the School of Art History at the University of Glasgow. Nina received her doctorate from the University of Glasgow in 2019 and has since been responsible for managing conservation teams at the Kunstsammlung. She has been sharing her museum's shift towards more sustainable practices through presentations and papers for the last several years. So each will present for about 15 minutes and followed by a 20-minute discussion where we invite you all to ask questions. So Pil ,let's start with you.

(04:12 Introduction to and History of the SMK)

Pil Rasmussen: Thank you Yadin. So thank you for the invitation and thank you for the presentation as well. Can you hear me okay? Yeah. So I'm here to talk a little bit about reducing energy consumption at the SMK, the barriers we've been facing, and also a little bit about the decision making that goes into a process like this. Next, please. So a little bit about the museum: we're the National Gallery of Denmark, we're located in the capital of Denmark, so an urban environment. The climate is north temperate and we have a building here that you see in the picture which was the original building built for the collections. Back in the middle of the 19th century when the abolition of absolute monarchy happened in Denmark the collections went to the state, and this building was built for the purpose of that. We also have a collection that spans seven centuries, so back to the middle ages and up until the present. Next, please. 

Here you see a view of the back of the building. I included this just so you get a sense of the building we're working with when we talk about this. So the extension is from the '90s, as you can see it's a building with completely different properties than the original one. Maybe you can also see that there is a glass cover between the two, or like, between the extension and the original building. Next, please.

This is an aerial view that I included just because I want to make a point of the fact that our main problem when it comes to indoor climate to begin with, regardless of widening parameters, is that the building is quite warm, all things considered. And what you see here is actually between the green copper roofs you see what used to be light wells, and those obviously also cooled the building, so back in the 60s those were covered, basically reducing the option of making the building work on its own with lower temperatures. And also the extension with the glass cover which is essentially a greenhouse so it gets very hot in the summer and heats up the two buildings. What you can also maybe see at the top of the image here is a lake. The museum is built on part of the embankment that used to surround Copenhagen so we're also quite close to water. Next, please.

(06:50 Navigating ‘Sustainability’) 

Going back to what we mean when we talk about sustainability- I know you probably all know the UN goals for sustainability and they sort of point in many directions, but the foundation for that obviously was the Brundtland report, and I included a a quote from there just because I think this dichotomy between being something for the present and being something for future generations is quite important when we talk about sustainability, the balance between the two. I think many conservators can see themselves easily in the future generations perspective, that's what we always worked for right? The problem maybe arises when we also try to be something for the present because that can also mean wear and tear of the collections. Next, please.

So when we work with sustainability and conservation we tend to mostly talk about the climatic and environmental sustainability part of it, so this comes down to using less energy, maybe choosing different materials, using less plastic, less solvents for conservation purposes, so everything to do with storage, transport, climate control, etc. The very kind of hands on specific materials oriented part of it, which makes sense for a conservator because we work in the material world, right? What I think we need to maybe take into account more in coming years is the social sustainability part of it; approaching a more museologically holistic approach that has to do with prioritization, resources, procedures, policies. For instance how much- how low will we put the lights so that people can see still, are we allowed to touch or not? Who's allowed to touch? Under which circumstances? It could also be to do with the layout and arrangement of the collection in the buildings that has to do with accessibility, universal design, sort of access for more different kinds of people in the museums. And my point is that this social sustainability also has to do with not excluding anyone from accessing the collections. Next, please.

So going back to the SMK. The sustainability efforts that we've already worked with include following the Bizot guidelines and ICOM-CC and ICC declaration from 2014, basically ever since it was published. This includes of course wider environmental parameters than the classic 50% plus minus 2. And we're also doing a lot of work trying to urge lenders to accept these conditions as well. I'll get back to that. Then we keep parts of our collection in an external, low energy storage, kind of dubbed ‘the Danish model’. I will also get back to that in a minute. We've participated in the Getting Climate Control Under Control program that was offered by Ki Futures. I believe it's running in North America right now as well so maybe some of the attendees are also part of that. This led us to begin experimenting with nightly shutdowns of our HVAC units, so turning off completely in selected areas, this is still in an experimental phase but we are doing it regularly still. I will also get back to that. And finally we are just starting out revising our transport requirements as well, but this is something I'll skip for today because it's less to do with energy consumption directly. Next, please.

So working with widening the environmental parameters for our collection I'm sure you all know the numbers 40 to 60% and 16 to 25° Celsius. The main point of this of course being following the seasonal fluctuations outside of the museum which is something we can do here in Denmark because of the temperate climate that we're in. Our focus is mainly on avoiding these daily rapid fluctuations because we believe those are most connected to the damage patterns and all of this is reflected in our outgoing loan requirements, which is actually publicly available on our website, you can just click there and go to the- scroll to the very bottom of the page, and and they're all there. So we try to keep it very public that we're doing this, which is a point in itself, I think. And part of the story also is that our special exhibition areas actually can be kept to 50% plus minus 2, so the classic museum conditions, and obviously our registars’ office they do a lot of, sort of, diplomatic work for the incoming loans trying to convince lenders that it's okay with the Bizot parameters, but actually if lenders are not comfortable doing that we can still keep it to 50 and obviously this has also meant that we've not really experienced any kind of adverse reactions to this. What we try to communicate is: this is what we do for our own collection and we believe it's safe enough. Next, please.

(12:32 The ‘Danish model’ and climate control)

So just circling back to ‘the Danish model’ I don't know if anyone's heard of it here but the point is to try to build low energy usage storage I'm not going to get too much into it, but just sort of mentioning the main points: the idea is to have high thermal insulation in the walls and roof, and no floor insulation or little floor insulation, which then allows you to use the heat and cold from the ground respectively in the winter and the summer to keep stable conditions inside. It doesn't need to be heated so it's quite cold for sort of working purposes, but for storage it's fine, and you only need occasional mechanical dehumidification. This requires a very low air exchange rate for it to work because you need a kind of inert building that keeps conditions. I've just included something about the energy usage which is quite low compared to retrofit stores or fully air-conditioned stores, and also the time weighted preservation index is actually quite high, it's over 80, and in some cases over 100, for these kinds of stores. So several of them have been built in the last I think 10, 15 years in Denmark and in the resources will be included an article by Morten Ryhl, who is my source for these numbers as well, and his peers, about this model if anyone's interested. Next, please.

So getting back to the program getting climate control under control. I've included just a few graphs to give you an example of of the results we got from that experimentation. So this is a data logger readings from an an exhibition space where we turned off the HVAC unit at night. This is from August so it's the warmest and most humid time of the year here in Denmark, so this is kind of like a peak test condition in a way. And the green line you see that's most irregular is the outside conditions and the three other lines are the data loggers from the room. The blue section is the time period where we shut off so what you can see is that although the temperature falls at night, and you can see it's actually quite high for what we want, outside and also at the beginning of the measurements, but it's very, very stable overnight. So actually for this measurement the HVAC unit is completely turned off. Next, please. This is the same period of time, the same room, and this is just the relative humidity you can see that it hits 100 sometime after midnight and indoor the climate conditions are very, very stable. As I mentioned before we have issues with the heat generally or the temperatures generally being a little too high, so we're also starting out at a very high relative humidity for the parameters that we set up, but you can see how little it actually rises overnight. Once we start the HVAC unit there's a little bit more irregularity because it's kind of trying to control it again, but it's still less than the 10% that we allow within 24 hours. Next?

(15:50 Barriers to making changes at SMK) 

Okay, so the barriers that we've encountered I'm sure many of you can recognize from all sorts of museum work. The first one is a big one: lack of resources, could be lack of funding for making changes to the HVAC units, we would like for instance, more zoning, more sensors placed in different places, but just getting the funding to do work like that. Also resources in terms of staff- if you want to work with something like this you actually need to set aside quite some time to talk about what you want to do, to experiment, to go back and evaluate, to start over and this requires setting aside time for the task. It could also be a lack of documentation of your building, or your HVAC unit, what you already have. Then a barrier I would say would also be working against the building, by which I mean trying to make the building do something that it's not really set up for. An example could be that we have a storage unit in the basement and as I mentioned we're quite close to the water, and in an like underground levels in an embankment, so we have a very sort of ‘moist’ exterior wall, that we then try to keep dry inside the room with the HVAC unit. And to me that's not good use of the resources, I would rather move this function to somewhere else. It could also be about  differences in the approach and focus across the specialist fields that work with this. For instance in our case, it was conservators and technicians and building managers, but also sustainability managers, and we all have a slightly different focus although we're working towards the same goal. And this can sometimes lead to making assumptions about what the others want, or making assumptions about what you know. I’ve learned a lot about HVAC units just from finding out what we are technically capable of that I didn't know before.

Then the next point is about the presumptions we make about lenders and peers assuming that they will not allow this or assuming that they will be judging us for not being professional if we allow wider parameters. Another barrier could be about visitor comfort: in Denmark if we follow the outside conditions it might be a little bit chilly to enter the museum and maybe this is something that also needs to be communicated and made a general decision. Also being a state entity as we are, we see a lot of outsourcing of different roles at the museum,guards, but also the HVAC units, maintenance, so this external organization around building management can also be a barrier in how you work. And finally, I want to mention habitual thinking: doing what we used to do because then we don't have to think about it too much. Next, please. I believe that all of this calls for kind of structured risk assessment this is a point that we haven't really gotten to in a formalized way yet, but this feeds back into the fact that we operate in a field of professional uncertainty. I believe it was maybe Jonathan Ashley Smith who originally coined this, but we don't know the consequences of our decisions as conservators today. Sometimes we know right away if it was the wrong consequence or the wrong decision because then we see the consequence of a crack or something happening. This is quite rare in most cases, it will be in maybe 50 years that somebody else sees the consequences, so we are actually required to make decisions without the luxury of seeing if it was the right decision or not. Regardless of that we still have to make the decisions to be able to even act, right? But the point is that this can make us rely on standards to a larger degree without considering whether or not they're actually suitable for this, but it feels safe because somebody made it a standard. Jane Henderson and Rob Waller wrote an interesting article about these decision-making strategies in conservation, and I just want to point out something that they pinpoint which is hands-on professionals might tend to think of risks in an individual object-based way because they are they are presented with the objects in front of them and ask for instance can this go on loan? Then they consider the risk to that specific object, whereas a preventive conservation professional might perceive risk in a more kind of collection as a whole perspective and think okay, this one object might risk damage but in the sort of whole collection perspective this is a minor thing. So there is a difference there that's also worth thinking about when you start discussing these things in your organization. Next, please.

Then I also just want to mention something that Jane Henderson also wrote about in a very interesting article about exclusion and how we as conservators might think that we're objective, right? The academization of the profession has led us to think in a very scientific way, so we believe that we are objective, we work in an objective way with the collections, it's all about research, it's also all about knowledge. But actually this whole field of uncertainty as well also means that we have a role in exercising power that we might not be aware of, so when we make decisions about who can or cannot touch or who or what object can or cannot travel to this and that specific location, we actually support existing structures in society and we need to reconsider whether or not those are always for the best in the broader perspective. And an example from the text is if we, by a very precautionary approach, for instance to climate requirements will actually exclude a lot of people from accessing these collections. For instance in non-European climates as it were in this case, who are not able to deliver the climate that we ask for, so this is really putting this whole issue about climate control into a broader context that has to do with social sustainability as well. Next, please.

(22:46 Moving Forward for the SMK)

Finally, I just want to mention that for me the future perspectives in this for SMK, what we're trying to work towards is a common language for what we're measuring and why, because I also believe that we tend to sometimes talk about apples and oranges. So I say I would like to have 50% plus minus 2, but I'm not saying where I want this measurement from, and it really makes a difference if it's from the ventilation duct, which is an average of all of the rooms that it takes the air from, or if it's next to the painting where people approach the painting and the heat from them, or even just the breath will affect the the measurement, right? So I think we also need to talk more about what are we measuring, but also why because we are very preoccupied as a profession with these measurements. But actually, what I want is for the collection to be safe, right? I don't care about the air, the air is just a vehicle to know something about what the collection conditions are, but we spend a lot of time, resources, energy on measurements, and I think this is an interesting point because measurements are about precision and control, but actually we're in a field of uncertainty so are those two even in the same kind of ballpark?

The other thing I want to mention is that we're working towards a more holistic risk assessment approach, I mentioned this before. And finally incorporating social sustainability as a parameter in decision-making in the field of conservation as well. And it's simply about putting sustainability in a broader context that's simply about materials, about energy use, about all of these things. And all of this obviously is about generating value for the core task which is about the collections and the audience for the collections as well. Thank you.

Yadin: Thank you Pil, that is so… There's so much there that I am so excited that you're sharing, and I look forward to discussing it a bit further after Nina presents. Nina Quabeck, please.

(: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Background)

Nina Quabeck: Well those thanks from me as well for the invitation to participate in this great series, and in what follows I would like to share our story of relaxing the environmental parameters at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. And can we have the next slide, please?

I should offer a bit of background on the Kunstsammlung which is located in Dusseldorf, Germany. It was founded in 1961 as the modern and contemporary art gallery of the state of Nordrhein-Westfalia, and our collection spans works created between 1905 and the present. It moved from a historic building to the purpose-built K20 in 1986. Between 2008 and 2010 K20 received an extension. Thanks to this extension we now have roughly 5,000 square meters for our collection and our temporary exhibitions. In 2002 the Kunstsammlung opened K21. Our collection of contemporary art moved into the state's former parliament building. There we have a total of 5,300 square meters for our collection and temporary exhibitions. We obviously rely on very large HVAC systems to control the environment in both venues and as we all know, apart from building a new museum, no other factor is as energy intensive as running a museum's HVAC. Next slide, please. When I got the position of head of conservation in 2019, the museum was already in the process of taking a long hard look at its carbon footprint, but the environmental standard at the Kunstsammlung was still the narrow range of 20° C plus minus 2 and 50% relative humidity plus minus 5%. But a lot of us were feeling increasingly uneasy about this default setting because tight environmental control comes with such high costs for the planet, for our budgets, and for people, because as Pil, you wonderfully summarized that tight control really significantly limits access to objects. Thus at the Kunstsammlung we formed a task force to tackle this thorny issue together. And next slide, please.

(27:22 How the KN-W tackled climate control)

This slide illustrates that our task force was really cross-departmental. Facility management played the most important role. While the Kunstsammlung is fortunate in that it still retains a full-time engineer on staff, it is actually external Siemens engineers who monitor and program our HVAC system. They make the changes to the software side and the hardware side. Because it was anticipated that this project would be very demanding for our colleagues, funding was secured and external energy consultants were hired to support and advise us. The other actors such as the head of collection, exhibition and collection management, and curatorial were all great supporters of the initiative and important ambassadors. Our registrars also played a crucial role because they were responsible for researching how insurers viewed the issue of widening climate parameters. Later on they adapted our loan policies and acted as ambassadors during loan negotiations. Next slide, please.

Conservation's role was to study the research available on the impact of relaxing climate specifications for artworks during which we quickly discovered that thinking around the narrow range had really changed since the mid 1990s, and by now the science is conclusive that a broader range is fine for a vast material, for vast majority of artworks. I reported this back to the group and we came up with an idea to study, to monitor the effects of a wider humidity range on real objects from our collection in a real display environment. Next slide, please.

This is all in my paper from ICOM-CC in Valencia 2023 so I’ll be quite brief here. Basically we selected a gallery in K20 with a standalone HVAC unit. There our H was allowed to drift within the range of 45 to 58% and we envisioned that we would allow maximum daily fluctuations of 6%. And here's a partial gallery view for you. The gallery houses mainly contemporary works from the collection, and in the image here the large work on the left is a 1997 Mario Merz drawing on tracing paper, on the pedestal is a 1989 Franz West sculpture made of papiermâché, and in the far back you can see a group of framed inkjet prints by Boris Mikhailov from 2000. All the works presented in the case study site included photographs, installations, sculptures, all made from a variety of materials, and during the study we learned a lot about the performance of the HVAC unit for this gallery under the new regime. The maximum rate of 6% change was not always achieved. Also the minimum or maximum values of the range were breached a couple of times, yet our conservation team was able to report that despite these jumps of sometimes up to 10%, we did not detect any changes of the artworks. As I said we looked after a wide range of objects during the case study, contemporary works in all their complexity, and they showed a great resilience to these humidity fluctuations. Next slide, please. Fast forward to 2022 when Russia attacked Ukraine. In Germany the threat of Russia ceasing to supply gas resulted in an appeal by our minister of culture to the cultural sector to save energy at the Kunstsammlung the escalating energy cost started to threaten carefully planned budgets, so our task force was invited to present our findings to our director. Our energy consultants estimated that implementing the full Bizot range would reduce consumption by about 30%, and the decision was made to move forward. It was agreed to try the Bizot inspired range of 40 to 60% RH with less than 10% change within this range in 24 hours, and a temperature range of 19 to 24° C with less than 3%- with 3° C change in 24 hours. We would test this new paradigm in all collection areas, most exhibition areas, the in-house storage, and the conservation studios. We also agreed to start experimenting with reducing fan speed and turning off the HVAC at night. It was also agreed to adapt our policy for outgoing loans accordingly. Next slide, please. I mentioned that the range was implemented in most areas. In these floor plans you can see zones highlighted in red. These are the galleries that are always used for temporary exhibitions. Because they are served by stand alone HVAC units we can easily provide the traditional climate parameters there, while the rest of the gallery spaces are climatized according to Bizot. This concept serves us well for it means that we can still borrow from lenders with strict requirements. Next slide, please. Let's take a brief look at our environmental data from K20's collection after the switch. We have been able to maintain Bizot conditions pretty reasonably. The blue band highlights the 40 to 60 RH range, and the yellow band highlights the 19 to 24° C temperature range. In autumn and winter it's obvious we are touching the lower end of the range constantly, and in summer we're very near the 60% end of the humidity range. The slow drifting of the temperature works quite well, but keeping to a maximum of 10% change of humidity in the summer period is proving a little tricky. Next slide, please. We developed a more detailed monitoring scheme to study whether small changes occur. For this new regime we selected certain artworks on permanent display in K20. High resolution images were taken prior to the switch. The works are compared to the photographs on a monthly basis and the monitoring is tracked in a checklist. One example of the works we chose is an unglazed, oil on canvas painting by Vassily Kandinsky and you can see my colleague Jessica comparing the high-res photographs on the iPad with the painting here. I can report that our collection has so far shown only a single climate-related change since the introduction of the new parameters. Next slide, please.

You can see here that it was an unglazed painting, where in December 2023 we noted locally lifting paint in an area with pre-existing cracking. It's the area I marked with a black rectangle, and in the center I added a detail of the area with a lifting paint. The change was presumably caused by RH fluctuations in November 2023, which occurred when nighttime shut offs were trialled without giving conservation notice. So in this part of the building the shut offs caused breaches of the 40% mark a few nights in a row, as well as fluctuations exceeding 10%, which weren't reported and which we caught only in December when we took the reading from our own data logger. We assume that these events caused shrinkage of the line support and compression of the paint layer in the already weakened area. The painting was taken to the conservation studio for treatment, which took one afternoon, then returned to the gallery. Next slide, please. No conservation professional is happy to see such a change occur in an artwork, but from a collection management perspective this one occurrence and its resulting half day of treatment needs to be weighed against how many resources were saved by relaxing the parameters. This slide provides at least a rough overview of how the energy consumption in K20 evolved. Electricity consumption in 2020 was a little over 2.5 million kilowatt hours per year, and last year it was still a little more than 2 million kilowatt hours. For gas in 2019 the consumption was a little under 3.9 million kilowatt hours, whereas in 2024 we are down to 1.1 million kilowatt hours. Next slide, please. So how long did all of this take? We adapted our policy for outgoing loans in January 2023 and reprogramming the HVAC system started then too, but as you can see the changes in the HVAC programming were only completed last autumn. The reason was that it took our external engineers a really long time to adjust the settings. It took many more hours than anticipated and so we kept having to wait for new budgets, too. Next slide, please.

(36:56 Learning Opportunities)

So to address the learning opportunities, here is number one: I would say the key to the switch was that we started out with just one of our galleries, and this approach to move forward in increments and slowly allowing for reviews and evaluation of data along the way made the idea a lot more palatable to all stakeholders, whereas going for a change of environmental parameters for the entire collection would have raised a lot more concern. Number two: as we learned from the incident with the night time shut offs, clear communication between engineers and conservators is key when the system is being tweaked. Afterwards we established more regular meetings and a shared folder in our cloud to document all the steps and decisions we agreed on. Number three: we realized belatedly that our system had insufficient individual meters to track energy use precisely. If possible, arrange for the necessary meters to be added to your system at the beginning of the process. And finally, number four: the importance of talking to our peers in conservation about making these changes cannot be overrated. Initially when we started approaching lenders we encountered resistance from colleagues at other institutions because they were convinced that this paradigm shift was forced on the Kunstsammlung's conservation team, and perhaps this is something I can tell you more about in the discussion. Next slide, please. So this is also my cue to thank the AIC sustainability group for this great opportunity to talk about our experiences and I would also like to thank all the experts whose publication have helped to argue our case, and all the colleagues who spoke to us about the subject and shared their insights. And finally I thank the fabulous task force at the Kunstsammlung and I look forward to our discussion.

(39:02 Discussion)

Yadin: That's great, Nina. Thank you so much. Yeah so both presentations are just rich with areas that I want to explore further. Can you each talk a bit more about navigating the decision for allowing for these changes and the resulting treatments, like Nina mentioned, to happen? I mean I see this as part of your risk assessment analysis where you're looking at the broader context of collections care and related greenhouse gas emissions, and there is a paper, I believe, that Amy is about to post on the chat where there's explorations around how there may be other reasons for and changes to the paint layer surfaces on oil paintings.

Pil: Well, in our case actually the decision was taken before this publication, so that's more like underlining or underpinning what we already wanted to do, but I think for us, as Nina was also addressing, it's really about not contributing to climate change which in turn will then be a threat to our ability to keep a stable climate for the collections, so it's kind of [laughs] it's contributing to the problem by trying to solve the problem, and and sort of where in that chain of events do you then start? And also it's connected for us to this concept of professional uncertainty. This was something that was talked about, like we really try to build the decisions we make on scientific research which we still can do but when you have a collection to manage you never know if each and every object will react in the way that the specific object that was researched will do. So you will have to embrace the fact that there's uncertainty and this requires of us as a profession a certain level of psychological safety, I would say, that's where you have to go with this if you want to make decisions in this direction. And it's not something that we are done with from one day to the next. We've been working on this for 10 years and still we have these discussions internally about when is it enough, when is it too much, but the point being that if you don't approach the limit, you will never know where the limit is. And I think this climate change situation, or the climate crisis even, calls for testing the limit a little bit more than we've been used to and dared to.

Yadin: Yeah. Pil: If that answers your question at all [laughs]. 

Yadin: I think it does, and I think it's the value of being able to learn from our mistakes, and this concept of failing forward I think is part of that, you know, we can't evolve unless we are pushing the envelope a little bit. Nina, did you want to add anything to that?

Nina: Yeah, I mean totally what you say Pil, but also for us sort of what factored into feeling fairly confident about greenlighting this whole process was that once we started implementing the Bizot range for the entire collections, that about 75% of our collection of classical modernism works, is framed and glazed so they're anyway pretty buffered from changes as well, so that factored in, that was quite a good argument also for our directors. And yeah, I think it's really a time where in retrospect I'd say why were the steps that we were taking so incremental, and why did we think we have the time for that?

Yadin: Yeah, no, we are in a serious crisis. I do want to make sure that everyone knows that's participating to please feel free to ask questions in the chat and Amy will relay them.

Pil: So, can I just add to what we were just talking about? Sorry, I just want to mention as well as I said our collection spans seven centuries, so I mean the biggest part of the collection has had a rich and full life before it even entered any sort of climate controlled environment, which is also visible on some of the objects, I will agree to that, but still it's been through its share of proofed fluctuations, right? So that's also something to consider when making this decision: what kind of collection do you have, and identifying where the more vulnerable objects are, maybe not start there, but start somewhere else where you feel more confident, that it will already have been through a lot.

Yadin: Right, right, no that's a really good point.

Nina: Yeah it was a really important theory for convincing our task force as well. It's just, yeah I mean artworks aren't born in the museum, so they've been exposed to real life conditions so probably what we do now even with Bizot is not going to make things worse.

Yadin: Right, right, yeah. you've both discussed the importance of incorporating all stakeholders into the decision-making processes around environmental expansions and maintaining effective and consistent communication. Do you have any tips and techniques, methods that you've used, that you found most effective to do that? Because it can get really complicated I imagine with all of the different stakeholders, especially when you have outside consultants coming in. So I'm thinking both in terms of all the stakeholders, who they are, and how to communicate with them ,and how that communication is actually maintained. Any tips on that?

Nina: well I mean I could maybe jump in and share a story of how difficult it can be with external partners to really grasp who needs to be at the table because for us about a year into the process I had a run in with our in-house engineer who was tagging along another person and the other person was really furious, and when they were introduced to me they I realized it was actually another Siemens engineer who's always called in to do the actual reprogramming on the ground, and that he had been left out from our discussions, and that he was under the impression that we were just trying to squeeze and squeeze sort of what the HVAC system is capable of to save money. So it took a lot of talking to explain that we were actually looking at the museum's carbon footprint, and now we always make sure that we invite him to our regular meetings and try to really explain what's behind those tweaks that we ask him to make, which for sure they can be very finicky, so he has my sympathy but yeah, it was a real annoying oversight that he wasn't there in the first place.

Yadin: Right, right.

Pil: Can I just add to that- I think this regardless of who the stakeholders are I think it's very, very important to be humble about the knowledge that the others have. I mean I started out thinking well now we just need to do this and do that to the HVAC unit and like, gradually I realized that it's not technically possible necessarily to do all the things I had imagined, and one thing is to switch off or change the control systems we also have external consultants for that, or external people coming in, so each time I would ask for a change that would cost somebody else on their budget to pay somebody to come in and do that. So kind of realizing the position each of you were in might be a good place to start. I could have wished that the first meeting we had about this involved having a round table and trying to learn a little bit more from each other. We just like, dove right in and started talking about what we wanted.

Yadin: Yeah I actually was speaking with a director of conservation at a museum who mentioned that the start to their conversations, and they're still in the processes, but the start to their conversations was getting together and discussing what was keeping them up at night, you know, what was what was their main worry? And that that opened up a dialogue that that she had never imagined would have happened, you know, that she learned things she had no idea about that really helped kind of bring them together, and so it kind of also shows one's vulnerability, too, which I think is an important aspect in this building the trust and relationships to have a have a good communication- solid communication.

Are there- I'm wondering in terms of structure of these communications, I mean is there some sort of tree of organization in terms of who gets to communicate with who? I mean, do you have it structured or is it mostly one person sort of keeps the conversation going, or do you have regular meetings…? How does that work?

Pil: I mean, I'm most right now mostly talking about the Getting Climate Control Under Control project which was more like, formally organized. There we had a project leader so somebody in charge of setting up the meetings, and making sure that everyone was called in and all of that, and then we had a structure of meetings relating to the progress we were making. So before we wanted to make a change we had a meeting before agreeing to what needed to happen and then we had an evaluation after, but communication could happen across… in between the meetings. Yeah.

Yadin: And do you have regular meetings with the facilities that, just in terms of just tracking what's going on on a daily basis, it's not specific to that project?

Pil: Well at the moment we don't, and so there's kind of a gap between when the project ended and sort of normal, sort of, facilities management conditions, but we are getting a new head of building and facilities management who starts May 1st and I think that that will be the proper person to pick up that.

(50:15 Q&A)

Yadin: Right, got it. Yeah I believe we have a question on the Q&A, Amy do you want to share?

Amy Crist: I will read it. Can you hear me okay?

Yadin: Yes.

Amy: From Katherine [?] I'm interested in how people are handling the Bizot 10% RH change in a 24-hour period, in terms of the number of times this fluctuation could occur. If a slow drift over 24 hours is potentially fine, but more rapid, repeated fluctuations in 24 hours might not be.

Nina: We try actually not to have more than half a degree temperature per change per hour sort of as an internal guideline, and that seems to work all right.

Pil: Yeah, I mean this is actually interesting because it also reminded me of something you said Nina, about you didn't see the the data logger reading until after a while, and actually this goes back to that because I think it's also important to try to figure out a solution for data logging where you can read in real time and you get alarms. So the data loggers that we had for this specific project that we still have, you will get an alarm if it goes beyond a certain boundary and since it was a local company they were also very open to suggestions about their product, they were kind of starting up a little bit, so we could suggest this way of getting an alarm if it drifted more than 10%. So it wasn't so bound up on when the time period started but anytime 24 hours had passed it shouldn't exceed the 10%, so that's one way of working with it I think.

Nina: Yeah, we- since that incident we've gradually managed to get Wi-Fi enabled data loggers in the critical areas, so… and we programmed those alarms ourselves so now, yeah, that wouldn't be happening to us again. But yeah, also as you said like, how much more money do we spend on those- on that equipment too cause like one of those devices costs about €500, so.

Pil: It's an investment, and I think you also have to kind of make a business case to your management saying we need to make this investment, it could also be getting more biometers on your HVAC unit which we also need to be able to get proper data. It could be anything, but doing the business case and setting it against the saved energy in the total running of the system, because it really has been identified as the one place where you can really save a lot, if you do this. So even though I know the sort of financial argument has been not necessarily welcomed by the person you mentioned, it still is something where you both get energy savings for the good of the environment but you also get financial savings. So I think, you know, you can make a business case out of this. And just circling back to the question as well I mean, we look at both. We both look at 10% drifting slowly over the period of time of 24 hours. I would not necessarily be concerned about rapid fluctuations if they're very rapid, because I don't believe the objects will have time to react either, so there's also something about reaction time when you look at this data and what kinds of objects you have.

(53:55 Closing Remarks)

Yadin: All right, really good points. Well, we're nearing the end of the hour, and I feel like this might be a good time to close but before we close I want to point out that Pil, Nina and I will be speaking this coming week (my goodness!) in Vienna at an international museum conference on climate change. So that is now available for virtual attendance so I encourage all participants to log on to that. I'm not sure if it'll be recorded, I don't know about that, but Amy just put the link to the website for that conference up on the chat and I hope that you can all participate in one way or another on that.

So thank you so much to the two of you for spending, I know that you're both incredibly busy and have a lot going on especially with this upcoming conference coming up, and I really appreciate you really and, you know, your time and the efforts that you put to put these great presentations together this recording will be posted on the AIC YouTube channel in the next couple of weeks, so we'll be sure to announce that when that's ready, so that the participants that are here can share it with their colleagues if they so wish. I want to thank Nick Farrell from AIC and Amy Crist for helping with the chat. Thank you all for attending and we really look forward to seeing you in the next webinar, which we don't know when that will be but sometime in the future. Thank you so much

Pil: Thank you for having us.

Nina: Thank you.

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