Graduate restorer Ina Birkenbeul has been head of the restoration workshop for painted wooden objects and paintings at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hildesheim/ Holzminden/Göttingen (HAWK) for three decades. A portrait
The workshop is large and deserted. Paintings and sculptures lie on the work tables in the bright room, but the students are missing. This semester, 17 students should be working in the large workshop room and six female students with their final theses in the small workshop room, but the coronavirus pandemic has also left this restoration workshop at the HAWK in Hildesheim deserted. Ina Birkenbeul has been running the restoration workshop for painted wooden objects and paintings for 30 years, but this is absolutely new: the 2020 summer semester is taking place exclusively online! A real challenge to hold all courses digitally via video conferencing from now on without any preparation. The HAWK was very well prepared for this sudden task. Thanks to existing digital learning platforms and intensive training for teaching staff, it was possible to quickly switch to online teaching. But what does practical conservation do?
Much of the content of conservation and restoration courses can be taught digitally, but as a “practical natural science”, the teaching of conservation and restoration science is closely linked to practical skills and observations of art and cultural assets, and studying conservation without working on the object is inconceivable. There is great concern about how long online teaching will last due to the coronavirus pandemic. The conditions on campus in Hildesheim are ideal. Since 2014, two courses of study in conservation and restoration have moved to a new campus together with the HAWK’s design courses. For many years, the two fields of study of the restoration of painted wooden objects and paintings and the restoration of furniture, wood and material combinations have formed a strong workshop team with Ina Birkenbeul and Dr. Ralf Buchholz. The site is also home to the wood technology and building physics laboratories, all the design workshops, the library, a cafeteria, plenty of space, sun and grass, in other words lots of opportunities to get together and communicate.
As workshop manager at the HAWK in Hildesheim, Ina Birkenbeul belongs to the status group of academic staff. By 2010, 101 diploma degrees had been awarded in her field of study and, following the Bologna Process, over 80 Bachelor’s and around 60 Master’s theses have been written. Behind these figures are people, students and individual life plans. The work of a workshop manager at a university requires not only a high and up-to-date level of professional competence, but also a great deal of socio-pedagogical and didactic presence, sensitivity and communication skills, the so-called soft skills. In addition to the classic tasks of workshop management, such as organization, cleanliness and safety in the workshop, this includes teaching for up to eight hours a week, supervising students in their practical work, procuring suitable study objects and final theses as well as carrying out project weeks.
Ina Birkenbeul is also involved in communicating her profession. In cooperation with the Hornemann Institute, she has organized specialist conferences, most recently on the topic of “Klimazone Kirche-Präventive Konservierung der Ausstattung” (2019), for which Ina Birkenbeul and Dr. Angela Weyer, Director of the Hornemann Institute, published the conference proceedings of the same name. Together with Dr. Weyer and the Institute team, she is involved in the Hornemann Kolleg’s evening lecture series, in which three individual lectures have been given each semester by invited academics on a theme for the past eight years. Incidentally, the last lecture series before the start of the coronavirus pandemic was entitled “After the catastrophe”, a title that we would interpret very differently today.
Read more on the topic of new museum buildings and renovations in the upcoming RESTAURO 5/2020, which will be published this week.