Symposium: “Holding It Together”

Making things last underpins a plethora of cultural practices—care, robust design, refashioning and waste—all rooted in diverse conceptions of endurance. In the early modern period, things were sometimes made to last by manipulating material characteristics; across Europe and Asia, examples range from the pursuit of hardness and heat resistance in the formulation of new recipes for varnish and porcelain, to the manipulation of natural dyes and their chemistry to find colors resistant to laundering and sunlight. Other practices sought endurance by anticipating later care and maintenance; silver objects, for example, required regular polishing to guard against the blackening action of oxygen and sulphur, extending their continual making into everyday routine.

Today, making things last is also an urgent issue. Our societies have become increasingly marked by throw-away cultures; planned obsolescence and fast fashion have fundamentally altered our relationship with material goods. The pressing environmental crisis urges us to find a different model.

Despite our universal preoccupation with making things last, we rarely examine how this desire shapes how we make, maintain, and mend things simultaneously. “Holding it Together: Making, Maintaining, and Mending from the Early Modern to the Present,” a two-day symposium taking place 25–26 June 2026, addresses this gap, bringing together makers and scholars of material culture to co-create new and robust concepts of lastingness rooted in both historical understanding and contemporary practice.

This symposium aims to create new research connections between scholars, artists, and makers based in the Netherlands and the Cambridge research environment.

Convened by:

• Tomas Brown—University of Cambridge
• Marjolijn Bol—JUST ART
• Melissa Calaresu—University of Cambridge