Old cots and cake tins, farmer's cupboards and irons, washboards, saucepans, meat tenderizers and agricultural implements - boxes of historical objects are piled up in the depot of the Jexhof farm museum.
Every piece has to be viewed, cleaned and inventoried.
Art restorer Teresa Donner will be working on this mammoth task - probably for years to come.
Unterschweinbach
- The 31-year-old dips a long cotton swab into gasoline and gently runs it over the blade of a knife.
The elaborately worked decorations come out better thanks to the cleaning.
“The knife belongs to a travel cutlery from 1823,” says the restorer, pointing to the fork with two long prongs and a worm-eaten leather case.
“At that time you obviously had your own cutlery with you when you were out for a long time.” The owner was certainly proud of this particularly beautiful copy.
A lot of tools are needed
Teresa Donner's workplace is a pleasantly tempered hall in the Jexhof depot in Unterschweinbach. Her tools include brushes and vacuum cleaners, a fiberglass eraser to remove corrosion, headlights, a digital camera, and a computer. Once she has carefully examined, cleaned and measured an exhibit, it is photographed and added to the digital inventory with a textual description. If the age and purpose of an object are not obvious, more or less time-consuming research is also necessary. “It's a very nice job here,” says Teresa Donner. However, one to which she cannot devote herself continuously. The 31-year-old comes to Unterschweinbach as a freelancer for one to two weeks a month.
Born in the Ruhr area, the center of her life is now in Berlin. There she completed the bachelor's degree in Restoration, Art Technology and Conservation Science and then completed her master's degree at the Technical University of Munich.
Many people are surprised that a large part of their work takes place in the laboratory, where materials are analyzed with the aid of a microscope and infrared spectrometer. But art restoration is not just about saving the peeling paint on old masters' paintings. Teresa Donner has specialized in modern art and cultural assets and is particularly familiar with old plastics. "The oldest plastics come from the 1870s and crumble over time," says the expert, who has already worked at the Deutsches Museum in Munich and the Hygiene Museum in Dresden.
The aim was to find storage conditions for objects made of materials such as celluloid or Bakelite that would slow down their decay.
On behalf of the Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation, Donner was involved in an excavation in Munich-Allach, where a labor camp of the Dachau concentration camp was uncovered.
She was called in "because archaeologists are not familiar with plastics".
Here, too, finds had to be identified and cleaned.
Infrared analyzes, chemical tests and knock tests provided information about whether you were dealing with objects from the period in question or younger, worthless objects, such as remains of toys from the 1970s.
A lot more to come
The finds also included personal items belonging to the camp inmates, including a dental prosthesis, the material of which could not be clearly identified despite all the analytical methods. Teresa Donner, who enjoys going into the mountains, tents, paints and reads, is very happy about the honorary position at Jexhof. Corona makes it difficult for her to build networks that she depends on as a freelancer. The Berliner-by-choice benefits from the fact that she is broadly positioned in her field and feels just as at home in the laboratory as in the farm museum. At Jexhof, she will not run out of work for a long time - provided the district continues to approve the funds for freelance workers.
