Salvador Muñoz-Viñas (in Spanish “Salvador Muñoz Viñas”) is a Spanish cultural heritage theorist and a conservator specializing in paper conservation. He works as a Professor at the Universitat Politècnica de València, where he teaches conservation theory and paper conservation techniques, and leads the paper conservation lab of the university’s Instituto de Restauración del Patrimonio. He has also worked in different universities and centers, such as the NYU, the HKB or Harvard University. His work on conservation theory has contributed to developing a more versatile and modern set of ethical principles in the field of cultural heritage.
Work
Muñoz-Viñas has published a number of works on paper conservation, but he is mostly known for his contributions to conservation ethics. In 2002 he published a paper titled “Contemporary Theory of Conservation”. In this paper he first presented the notion that a different theory of cultural-heritage conservation from the ‘classical’ ones actually exists. In 2003 he published Teoría contemporánea de la Restauración, where he developed his views on conservation ethics more in-depth. Shortly after that, he wrote Contemporary Theory of Conservation (2005), in which these ideas are presented in a different style. Later on, he developed these views in different papers and lectures, some of which are gathered in On the Ethics of Conservation Ethics of Cultural Heritage Conservation (2020). The Transactional Nature of Conservation (2018) is also based on a lecture delivered at the Reinwardt Academy in Amsterdam. His last work, A Theory of Cultural Heritage. Beyond the Intangible (2023) represents what could be called a ‘post-critical’ view of the very notion of cultural heritage.
Aside from these works, he has also published other books and papers on conservation ethics and theory and on paper conservation techniques. Several lectures and presentations are also available in different video repositories. Many of them are available in Muñoz-Viñas’ pages in Academia.edu and Researchgate.net.
