We have all decided that conservation is the career path for us. But what does it mean to be a professional conservator? What are the considerations, implications and ramifications of this choice? Just like in any other profession, many of us students and emerging conservators are still trying to understand what to expect from the future we chose.

The title of this year’s conference reflects the scenario of our profession today: conservators at different career stages, working in the most diverse areas of cultural heritage across the globe. It also reflects the different possibilities that lie in wait as we enter the working world. Hands-on, preventive, curative, digital, research or more business-oriented. All of us have the potential to become one or more of these faces of conservation.

In the 6th edition of IIC’s Student and Emerging Conservator Conference, these faces are represented by the titles of the three sessions: 1) Conservation Sciences and Research, 2) Conservation and Restoration, and 3) Preventive Conservation and Management.

The selected colours have yet another hidden meaning, as they symbolise the different aspects that characterise a conservator’s career: blue targets the brain and the cold rationality required to be a conservator; red brings out the passion and the emotion that drive us to choose this field; and yellow represents all of the successes that await us in our professional futures. All three of these colour-coded aspects of our work can be found in each of these three sessions. We aim to make this transversality and interchangeability a common thread throughout all of the discussions.

This conference will provide a starting point for engaging and fruitful discussions, a place where our most unsettling and existential questions can be addressed. We hope to contribute to a better understanding of what each career path offers and how we can become relevant actors in the field of our choice.