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What is your role and what does it involve?

I am a Lecturer in History of Art, Materials, and Technology at the Department of History of Art. This involves teaching, research, and an ongoing commitment towards the life of the Department. More recently, I was also appointed Vice-Dean Bicentenary / UCL200 Faculty Champion of the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences and I am supporting the Faculty’s vision and activity to celebrate UCL’s 200 anniversary and the excellent teaching and research that our Faculty has been – and will be – developing.

What do you find most interesting or enjoyable about your work?

My research tends to focus on contemporary art and culture, and I’ve found a lot of joy in working with artists, communities, and colleagues from both academic and non-academic contexts. I am also fascinated with the tiny little details one finds when doing research whether with people or in archives. More recently, I fell in love with the discovery rush one has when writing and I have started to accept the somewhat gloomy feeling when writing doesn’t go as I wish it would. 

Tell us about your research.

As happens with most of my colleagues, my research is quite varied but, as said before, tends to focus on the contemporary as a broad category. I am interested in understanding the role objects, people, and institutions have in the making of art and cultural heritage, not only in terms of creative process and production but also in the ways in which the identity of these agents, as well as their potential as knowledge-makers, changes through the relationships they produce and/or enact in collections and other contexts of collecting and the impact that has in terms of ethics. For example, I want to know how forms of acquisition produce forms of cultural transfer and mobilise identities and knowledge, or the ways in which the discourse around conservation as both a practice and an ambition reiterates or refuses certain values that emerge from the objects across cultural contexts.

What led you to pursue a research career in this field?

I was always keen to know how things work and how things come to be what we think they are and cultural heritage practices have always fascinated me because what they are needs to be constantly negotiated and they are incredibly contingent on who is asking the question. I pursued these sorts of questions since my Masters and I was increasingly drawn to objects that – purposefully or not – pushed the boundaries of what they are either more frequently or more assertively. I joined the project ‘Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum,’ led by Prof Pip Laurenson and held at Tate in 2018, and this project inspired me to know more about how museums participate in the creation of those boundaries and the ways in which those boundaries can participate in the making of these practices and their manifestations.

What working achievement or initiative are you most proud of?

I have had various academic outputs and have developed various initiatives since joining UCL, but I think the thing I am most proud of has been the relationship I have been able to establish with my students. I have been learning a lot about how to be a better teacher and researcher at every interaction with them. For example, I am now working with some of them to publish some of the things they wrote for an assignment I co-developed with staff from UCL Special Collections and it has been such a joy.

What's next on the research horizon for you?

I have a few projects in the pipeline, but I think they will have to be slow-burning projects as I have to dedicate some of my attention to the Bicentenary. They are mostly focused on the ways in which museums operate and how that impacts the making of cultural heritage objects. Hopefully, you will hear more about these soon.

Can you share some interesting work that you read about recently?

I am finishing reading Beverley Best’s The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx's Capital and it has been absolutely inspiring. I think this book has made me change my mind about some of my research directions in a way I haven’t experienced since I read Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning.

What would it surprise people to know about you?

Perhaps they would be surprised with music taste, but maybe we are all somewhat surprising in that area, are we not?

Links

• Dr Marçal's academic profile
• UCL History of Art

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