This project will uncover how collecting practices reflected and informed wider discourses about the study of textiles in Britain and Spain’s national museums and institutes, by tracing specific textiles before and after their acquisition. Whilst fashion and textile studies are now recognised fields of academic research, we still know little about the role of museums in helping to facilitate this change. Cabrera will build on her extensive research to date at the National Museum of Decorative Arts (MNAD), to undertake new comparative studies of UK and Spanish approaches to the study of textiles. This will be achieved via case studies of some of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s (V&A) earliest acquisitions, which have direct connections with Spain. The project will focus on the period 1852-1951, during which many key national museums were born. It will assess the collections and impact of the V&A, which was the model for the MNAD. The V&A will undertake a major redevelopment of its Textile and Fashion Galleries commencing after 2017, which makes re-examination of its historic collections very timely. Cabrera will study textiles held at the V&A from a multidisciplinary perspective, to develop specific object histories and shed light on the formation of European museums and the use of their objects by the creative industries. Case studies will employ approaches from art and design history and engage with new ideas about the transfer of technologies, including the characterisation of raw materials and analysis of fabrics. Key sources will include unpublished archival files, reports and photographs, object labels and the textiles themselves. Cabrera’s training programme would develop her expertise through sustained engagement with museum collections and curatorial and research staff, working across a range of contexts and disciplines. As well as scholarly outcomes, wide public dissemination of the research will be achieved via online blogposts and catalogue entries.

The French collection of French furniture at the Victoria and Albert Museum is especially strong in pieces dating from 1640-1800, which were last catalogued in 1930. Amongst these are pieces by the most well-known cabinet-makers (including Boulle, Cressent, Oeben, Riesener and Roentgen), several of which have royal provenances. These all fit very well the established category of 'fine French furniture', which is exceptionally highly-valued on the art market. This catalogue of 143 pieces of veneered case furniture will fully document these pieces, bringing in-depth knowledge about them into the public domain for the first time. It will both add to the knowledge of the practices of individual workshops and extend our undertsanding of object types, such as chests of drawers, writing desks and music stands. \n\nHowever, it will go further than that, by including the history of those objects which were pieced together in the nineteenth century on the art market, and acquired by the Museum in the nineteenth century as authentic seventeenth and eighteenth-century pieces. These entries are not relegated to the back of the catalogue, or given any less attention than ornate cupboards owned by Louis XVI or Marie Antoinette. They will be fully documented and analysed so that readers can see (from text and photographs) how distinctions can be made between cabinet-making work of different periods, including the practices of sevententh and eighteenth-century French workshops and later English reproduction work. These pieces have long been relegated to store, and no published record of them exists, which means that all scholarship to date has ignored them.\n\nEach entry includes a great deal of physical evidence about the object, as follows:\nTitle; object type; maker; date and place of manufacture; materials; marks and labels; dimensions.\nProvenance and publication history.\nPhysical description, describing the arrangement of materials and its construction, with a focus on alterations.\nFinally, the commentary gives a full history of the piece, including an assessment of its importance, which might include its stylistic attributes, such as an advanced type of neoclassical ornament in the cast, chased and gilded brass decoration to a commode, or its place in the development of a particular form, for example, noting the first known integration of an inkwell into the drawer of a writing desk.\nThe catalogue entries will be supported by over 800 photographs, taken at various stages during the research, often while the objects were dismantled. They include views of the entire object and its marks, and extend to details of construction and evidence of alteration and transformation.\n\nThis catalogue project won a Getty Foundation grant of approx. $182,000, which paid for the research of the applicant, a research assistant, a conservator, and consultant reports from a clock historian, wood identification specialists, an expert in stones, and a report from the British Museum on the material composition of over twenty porcelain plaques used to decorate the exterior of some of the furniture. This proved that, contrary to the opinions expressed by several experts on Sevres porcelain, all of these plaques were in fact soft-paste, probably dating from the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Most of them were cut down and re-decorated in the nineteenth century to add value to French furniture on the London art market.\n\nThe V&A will publish this volume, and volume II, on the carved and gilded furniture collection, which will be completed by another author by September 2007. Both will appear in 2009. The V&A is seeking funds to subside the large number of illustrations (over 800). £10,000 has been pledged, and the V&A will apply to grant-giving and commercial bodies for further grants.

How can we bring digital technology, performance and curatorial practice together to give young people a sense of creative agency when encountering a historical object? This interdisciplinary, visitor-focused project draws together the curatorial, theatrical, design and technological expertise of three leading partners: the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), the UK's national museum of art, design and performance; Punchdrunk Enrichment, pioneers of educational and community-based immersive theatre; and award-winning creative technology studio, The Workers. Together, the partners intend to prototype a mixed reality environment for the display of archive material - in this case the handwritten manuscripts of Charles Dickens - that will give young people aged 15-18 a sense of creative agency when encountering an historical object. The manuscripts are the best evidence we have of the creative process of one of the UK's most important and renowned authors, whose work has continuing relevance for young people today. Dickens was an observer of urban material culture and life in a period of rapid technological innovation and widespread financial insecurity, a writer who explored themes that still resonate today. However, the act of writing and redrafting on paper is becoming an increasingly rare (perhaps even obsolete) creative practice. The manuscripts might show us how an author revises and imaginatively iterates - but that process needs to be unlocked for visitors. By prototyping an immersive experience, centred on the manuscript, we will explore how digital technologies can augment immersive theatre techniques to create a performative environment, one that does not necessarily rely on performers. We will answer the following questions: How can the interactions between people and objects within a digital and a physical space drive a narrative in a museum context? How can digital technologies put the museum object at the heart of an immersive experience? How can the museum object become part of a performance? Through discovering and understanding Dickens's creative process, we aim to inspire self-expression - an important strand of Punchdrunk Enrichment's projects. We intend for this experience to have a life beyond museum for the children involved - that it will make a lasting appeal to their creative spirit. Getting children to talk about their experiences, encouraging them to write stories, discuss them and expand their vocabulary have been important motivations in Punchdrunk Enrichment's work to date. This research will be of future creative and commercial value by potentially informing the development of a major exhibition on Charles Dickens at the Museum (2020) and the future display of the V&A's nineteenth-century collections, as well as inform practice beyond the museum itself, and is of institutional significance because it will allow us to not only interrogate the latest technologies, but also to help shape and drive innovation in this area with our peers in the creative and technological industries. We will gauge how methodologies identified through the project will help forge new creative practice, within the museum and beyond, and consolidate our findings in a case study and preliminary toolkit. The research will help deepen links between creative industries and research sectors by presenting a case study and toolkit to understand, experiment with and exploit immersive technologies to create new experiences. It will help show how the next generation of digital content and services can be conceptualised, produced and exploited within the UK creative economy.

This project focuses on a comprehensive refurbishment of the specialist Conservation Science Laboratory at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Its aim is to transform the current 25-year-old facility, which is no longer fit for purpose, into a cutting edge, multidisciplinary, flexible space which is efficient, sustainable and a catalyst for research excellence and innovation in collections care. The Lab requires urgent modifications to reflect advances in Conservation Science, the V&A's changing needs and priorities, emergent areas of specialism, as well as ever-growing capacity needs. The proposed upgrade comprises a refurbishment of the Lab space and an upgrade of our end-of-life, inefficient, and inadequate equipment (including introduction to the V&A of equipment which until now was only accessed off-site). This major transformation of the Science Lab will: a. tackle current inefficiencies caused by obsolete equipment and rigid, outdated space arrangements b. increase the capabilities of the Science Lab and expand the scope of its current research and collections care, across all V&A sites and UK-wide c. augment our ability to assist regional and national institutions in the care and investigation of their own collections d. foster enhanced access to V&A collections for researchers, students, practitioners and artists e. improve our educational and training offering, facilitate new, cutting-edge research and foster innovation f. increase capacity to bid for external research funding g. provide a setting for the incubation of new ideas, the trigger for new creative processes and the exploration of novel materials by artists, makers, scientists and practitioners. This upgrade will be of major significance to the heritage sector and to Heritage Science research in the UK and internationally. In expanding the scale and scope of Heritage Science provision at the V&A, it will lay the foundations for the establishment of a world-leading Heritage Science infrastructure at the Museum.

Since the late eighteenth century, alongside Enlightenment philosophy on human rights, western European scholars have conceptualised human universality in universal histories and universal museums. In its investigation of the evolution of museum collections, the 'Universal Histories and Universal Museums' project strongly connects with the third objective of both the 'The Past in the Present' and the 'Care for the Future' programmes: the mediation, and the cultural and social appropriation of the past, from transnational perspectives. Looking at the history of museum collections is one of the ways in which we can examine how history is made, displayed and disseminated through the uses, legacies and representations of the past. Our research will highlight the constituent features of encyclopaedic knowledge about western universal human histories, from the nineteenth century to the present day. It will also examine the assumptions and limitations of such understanding. In particular, the project seeks to address questions regarding the representation of the diversity of cultures that define human universality, the articulation of historical and anthropological approaches to the description of humanity and the influence of social knowledge practices on the structuring of universal knowledge. The project also considers ways thinking about the past help us to prepare for a global future that incorporates more diverse universalities. The first phase of the project will combine critical investigation through four workshops and two historical case studies, based in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Musée du quai Branly. The project's second phase will consolidate the first phase research in a small exhibition based on the two case studies, and a conference timed to align with the opening of the Louvre Abu Dhabi - a contemporary universal museum. Publications will include a book, articles in peer-reviewed journals and digitisation of key archival resources.