AIC's 45th Annual Meeting

The Convent of the Mercedarian Sisters was built in 1727 within the Historic Centre of Lima. It is one of the convents that form part of the Provincial Archbishop of Lima, where the Cathedral of Lima conducts restoration projects through it technical team. In our experience on convents, the conservation works require a strategy to convince the occupants that their real and personal properties are Cultural Heritage of the Nation. We should articulate the conservation and restoration needs, with their daily life, and explain what they call "conservation measures”. Since our first encounters with religious orders, we have been able to establish a work methodology based on dialogue and interaction, aimed at the conservation of cultural goods. In the case of the Convent of Madres Mercedarias, the Choir of the Convent, a 300-year-old architectonic structure, never intervened before, showed a high level of deterioration, which caused a complex intervention at structural and architectural level, besides the restoration of the Assumption Altarpiece placed in the choir room, which was about to fall too. Although the decision to execute the restoration of the choir room was taken, there were other items we found which needed immediate intervention, such as the paintings with high historic and artistic value (many of them from 17th and 18th centuries) which needed an adequate conservation preventive management. One of the basic considerations for the execution of conservation works with Mercedarian nuns have been the permanent communication and participation, since they have carried out for decades superficial maintenance works, which sometimes were detrimental for the conservation of the items: "shaking”, "washing”, "polish”, "rub”; besides, the construction of buildings with modern materials in several sectors of the convent were detrimental to conservation too. In the daily activities of nuns, we could identify a series of useful preventive conservation activites, and others that had to be changed, as well as the important location of damages: they were able to identify the problems and deterioration levels of the items and cloister's structures. Once the restoration processes finished, the old maintenance techniques were compared with the interventions for architectonic and collection conservation.