Norsk Teknisk Museum (Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology), Oslo, 12-14 October 2025
By Harriet Barratt, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Visual and Material Lab, Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities
The 30th meeting of the ARTEFACTS network – an international network of academic and museum-based scholars of science, technology, and medicine – took place in Oslo in October 2025, taking as its theme ‘Care and Repair’. The call for papers asked for discussions on how ‘erosion, breakdown, and maintenance, instead of progress and innovation, can be starting points for research’.
The diversity of talks under this provocative theme, and of the objects presented as discussion points, was huge – from the Puffing Billy steam engine to the skeletal remains of conjoined twins, and the Alaskan oil pipeline to the Sokol space suit (see the full programme).
Across such a range, common themes emerged around what it really means to care for something, or for a community; what the function of repair might be practically, socially and psychologically; and what the duties and limitations of the museum’s role in caring in its broadest sense might be.
There was something exciting to be taken from every talk. Standout elements to me included Arne Langleite’s (Norsk Teknisk) discussion of the ethical implications of making medical photography collections available online; Erin McLeary’s description of the careful archival research her team at the Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia has undertaken to unearth the individual stories behind medical museum catalogue entries; Tim Boon’s (Science Museum/UCL) careful categorisations of the meanings of ‘use’ of objects; and Juan-Andreas Leon’s overview of the new acquisition of Stephen Hawking’s office, currently being replicated at the Science Museum complete with all its contents.
My own talk was on a prosthetic leg from the Science Museum’s collection that was originally provided to a First World War solider as a temporary item. This soldier refused to give up the leg upon his return home, and instead made, quote, ‘very extensive repairs to it over several decades, using both cement and glue’. In fact, he grew so used to the leg that, when he eventually accepted a conventional prosthesis, it had to be heavily weighted to enable him to walk. What is even more astonishing is that he worked as a roof tiler. I spoke about how we might think about this object using psychoanalytic object relations theory, specifically Donald Winnicott’s ‘The Use of an Object’ (1969).
The value of the truly interdisciplinary discussion on offer at the ARTEFACTS conference was huge. As a medical humanities scholar researching the material culture of medicine, I am used to thinking deeply about the power of objects and the narratives employed to represent people’s relationships with these objects, but much less so in witnessing the day-to-day work of conservators.
One of the most striking and thought-provoking elements of the conference for me was the ability to track the language of conservators in relation to the objects for which they care, and the repeated medical metaphors at play. Collection items suffer ‘object injuries’; conservators carry out object ‘dissections’, ‘organ harvesting’ of object components, and ‘autopsies’; the quest to ‘save the patient’ cannot always be completed, despite the ‘palliative care’ on offer, meaning that a ‘do not resuscitate’ order comes into effect.
Even more striking was that many of these terms came to the fore through Mike Loftus’ fascinating discussion of caring for aeronautic collections at the Norsk Luftfartsmuseum (Norwegian Aviation Museum) in Bodø, in the very north of Norway. Again, this helped me to understand the limitations of my own viewpoint. I am so used to conceiving of ‘the object’ in terms of the scale of my own work – something that you can either hold in your hand (a syringe, a prosthesis), or can at least engage with at an interactable scale (a hospital bed, operating apparatus, an MRI scanner). This order of scale puts the focus on the relationship between an object and the individual body of a patient or clinician.
Mike Loftus instead painted a compelling picture of the issues with large-scale objects as passenger jets, which can often only be stored outside due to space constraints. We may often think of objects in museum collections as ontologically static, with a fixed physical state and a (presumed) fixity of meaning. I simply had not thought about the daily deterioration of objects such as planes, the very great issues this poses to conservators and curators, and the linked shifts in meaning of these objects. As Hilary Geoghegan and Alison Hess put it:
“Far from reaching a terminal point, objects continue to change, both physically and in terms of the meaning attached to them. First, objects flake, rot, fade and rust. Interventions to prevent this involve altering the state of the materials and so, physically, museum objects remain in a constant state of flux. […] Second, the meaning of objects changes. Research by content developers and curators as part of the gallery design process reveal previously unknown context, and new exhibitions place objects in new narratives.” (Geoghegan & Hess, 2015, p. 451)
This was the core benefit of the ARTEFACTS conference for me: it gave me new contexts, new narratives and new relationships through which to consider my own work. Seeing the granular detail of material practices at different scales and for different purposes was truly illuminating, and has enriched both my knowledge of and my appreciation for all that museums of science, technology and museums do for the objects and people they aim to care for.
ARTEFACTS is an international network of academic and museum-based scholars of science, technology, and medicine, who share the goal of promoting the use of objects in research. The consortium was established in 1996 and since then has held annual conferences examining the role of artefacts and collections in the making of science and technology and related areas. See the ARTEFACTS Consortium web page for more information.
References
Geoghegan, H., & Hess, A. (2014). Object-love at the Science Museum: cultural geographies of museum storerooms. Cultural Geographies, 22(3), 445-465. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474014539247
