Please feel warmly invited to our upcoming series Condition Reports this autumn. Across four evenings, we look at art conservation as both a practical field and a lens for thinking about the condition of the art world today. In conservation, a condition report is the first evaluation of an artwork: it notes materials, changes, and past treatments, and guides decisions on repair and preservation. It is both a technical document and a moment of reckoning – asking what has been lost, what can be stabilised, and how an object can continue to exist. 

Our series borrows this title to expand the idea further. What does it mean to produce a condition report not only on an individual artwork, but on the systems that frame and circulate cultural objects? Who decides what gets preserved, and under what terms? How do institutions, collectors, and markets shape what survives and what disappears? 

To open up these questions, we meet three conservators in their studios — Hildegard Homburger, Sarah Seyring, and Katharina Martinelli (founder of Roeck Restaurierung), who introduce us to their daily practice. Their work, often invisible, sustains artworks over time in collaboration with museums, galleries, auction houses, and insurance companies. 

The series also invites artist and filmmaker Robin Kötzle to present Our Little Vase, a research project tracing antique vessels across 2,500 years. His work shows how precise documentation and preservation create both historical continuity and cultural value, and how the act of reporting shapes what we remember. We are excited to share these evenings with you – to examine artworks up close, and to reflect on what it means to care for the conditions that make cultural memory possible.

To book a spot RSVP via team@grotto.berlin

10 October – Hildegard Homburger: From paper conservation to contemporary paper art.

24 October – Sarah Seyring: A look into the delicate world of painting restoration.

21 November – Katharina Martinelli of Roeck Restaurierung: Experimenting with materials in the contemporary art (painting & sculpture restoration).

12 December – Robin Kötzle: Our Little Vase, a talk on history, circulation, and what we choose to preserve.

Initiated and co–curated by Maria Helena Konttinen Nerhus with Leonie Herweg