The Ethics Committee

Who decides what is worth preserving? What other worlds might become possible if we cared for things differently?

The Ethics Committee is a collaborative artistic research project developed by Dani Admiss and Gillian Russell for the 2019 Porto Design Biennale.

Taking the form of a fictional museum committee, the project invited designers, curators and researchers to reconsider the values that shape what museums collect, preserve and pass on to future generations.

Conservation is never neutral. Every decision to protect an object, species or cultural practice also involves decisions about what matters, whose knowledge counts and what may be neglected. As environmental crises and emerging technologies transform relationships between humans and the living world, the project asked whether existing approaches to conservation are adequate for the futures people are creating.

Over a series of workshops at the Museu da Quinta de Santiago, participants became members of a fictional collecting committee. Each nominated a neglected artefact for preservation, investigating the social, political and ecological relationships through which it had come into being.

The committee collectively selected a British National (Overseas) passport for its collection. This seemingly ordinary document became a way of examining how objects produce and maintain systems of identity, citizenship, belonging and exclusion.

Working through speculative fiction, ethics of care and collective decision-making, participants developed a series of alternative conservation reports. Each report imagined the passport within a different world, governed by its own values, relationships and understandings of responsibility.

These reports formed an exhibition within the fictional Museum of Many Worlds, where conservation became an experiment in how things might be understood, valued and cared for differently.

Rather than seeking a single universal code of ethics, The Ethics Committee explored the possibility of a pluriverse: a world in which many worlds coexist. It asked how curatorial practice might move beyond deciding what to preserve towards learning how to care with others, including those whose perspectives are often excluded from institutional decision-making.