OBL/QUE

OBL/QUE is a student publication, edited by Natalia Escobar Castrillón, compiling papers from the seminar Discourses and Methods: Conservation, Destruction, and Curating Impermanence co-taught by Prof. K. Michael Hays and the editor. As Castrillón defines it, “OBL/QUE is neither parallel nor perpendicular to a prior direction. It diverges from the normative and canon but does not necessarily oppose them. It is a third path […] it is a slant that simultaneously discloses something of the world and conceals something in its distortion.Critical Conservation is this third path. An alternative angle that ultimately transforms the object of study and the nature of the questions.” The publication recalls the debate surrounding the reconstruction of San Marco’s Basilica bell tower in Venice in the early 20^th century: was it restoration or forgery? Drawing on Cesare Brandi’s position —that what needed to be reestablished after destruction was not merely the material tower but the idea of the bell tower— the journal understands the framing of critical conservation as the restoration of conservation itself, shifting it from a technical practice to a philosophical inquiry.

The first issue seeks contemporary frameworks for interpretation and conservation through diverse perspectives on history, memory, identity, and disciplinary autonomy. Essays are organized into four thematic sections: Allegorical History, Embodied Memory, Agonism of Identity, and Objects and Autonomy. Each section is prefaced with an interpretive editorial statement, and the essays are carefully cross-referenced to architects, objects, events, and theories. At once a student-led publication and a curated extension of course development and coursework OBL/QUE experiments with a hybrid model of content gathering. With five issues successfully published thus far, it demonstrates the viability of this approach while continuing to test how such a framework might develop into a sustainable and innovative mode of student publishing. It currently operates as an open access digital bi-annual publication with a call for papers by invitation and continues to be edited and published by Natalia Escobar Castrillón.