38 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM she says, adding, “We have a major ethical code that we stick to very strictly. We all have master’s degrees or higher.” Conservation wasn’t even on Alexandra’s radar when she first attended college at Lorenzo de’ Medici Institute in Florence. Drawn to film and the darkroom, Alexandra initially focused on photojournalism, but grew disenchanted by the push for digitization. Feeling lost, Alexandra went searching for answers. “I was quite literally just wandering the halls, like, ‘I don’t really know what direction to take.’” Passing the conservation studios, she paused in the doorway. What is that? she remembers thinking. A professor caught sight of her lurking outside his classroom. “Are you going to stand there or are you going to come in?” he asked. He handed her a hefty baroque candlestick and told her to start polishing. “It was love at first sight,” she laughs. {punchline} “We treat it like royalty.” This heated device stirs starch paste, an essential adhesive in paper conservation, saving a torturous hour of stirring by hand. “Everybody jokes that if you have one in your studio and if, God forbid, there was an emergency, grab the Cook ‘N Stir because you can never find them!” Alexandra explains that the starch paste, like the pigments they use, is reversible—and that’s key. “There’s a difference between restoration and conservation,” she says. “Restoration is getting something back to its original state ‘by any means necessary,’ often very irreversibly. It’s usually done by an untrained individual who is trying to make something look new.” Conservation, by contrast, works with age, not against it. “We want you to know that there’s a distinction,” PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF: ACT ART CONSERVATION
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