Beyond Reason
Chemical Treatments and Alchemy of Last Resort

Twenty years after the Conservation and Restoration Treatments seminar, we have organised an intensive Autumn School on historical, current and experimental conservation and restoration treatments. It will take place during one week, from 16 to 20 November 2026, be hosted by our company AV Preservation by reto.ch and held mainly at the Park Innovaare in Villigen, Switzerland.

The aim of the Autumn School is to provide an intensive one-week training course for experienced conservators, film preparators and scanner operators with basic knowledge of photochemical film and/or magnetic tape chemistery. Our team is complemented by several specialists in order to provide teaching and experimenting on chemical treatments in a pleasant learning environment. The Autumn School will supplement professional instruction with social events and local sight-seeing excursions. We have worked out a detailed course programme that includes unbelievable lectures, unforgettable practical exercises and spectacular demonstrations of both advanced chemistry and completely crazy alchemy. This also includes processes that enable a final digitisation, but completely destroy the original analogue medium, which we ruled out twenty years ago. We strongly believe that the digitisation of analogue film, video and sound collections needs to be speeded up!

There are twelve student positions available. If there are more applicants than available places, a selection will have to be made; if there are fewer than eight applicants, the Autumn School must be cancelled.

The fee for the one-week course is CHF 3 000 and covers training, personal protective equipment, accommodation (six nights from 15 to 21 November 2026), meals and course-related visits. Travel costs to and from Switzerland are not covered. Please note that accident and illness insurance is also the responsibility of the participants.

Closing date for receipt of applications is 8 October 2026 at 15:00 CEST (that’s 13:00 UTC). The link to the registration form will be online in a couple of months, but you can already ask us questions using the feedback form.

Draft Programme

Each day has roughy the same structure and consists of lectures (at most half the time) and practical work with in-depth discussions of the results achieved (at least half the time). The topic specified for each day should be considered the main topic of that day. Of course, things are correlated and cannot be strictly separated, but this separation is useful for didactic reasons. Different approaches and solutions are repeatedly planned, then implemented and finally discussed in order to explore their advantages and disadvantages.

2026-04-13