114mc01-AL-2022_Turin, University Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (MAET), Gamelan

Facilitated description: 

 

The Gamelan is an ancient percussion musical instrument used to accompany puppet theatre and dance. 
Gamelan comes from the island of Java (Asia). 
All of the Gamelan's instruments were put together between 1850-1900.
The instruments were built in very ancient times (1400 BC). 
The Gamelan is kept at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the University of Turin. 
The La Venaria Reale Conservation and Restoration Centre restored the gamelan in 2022-2023. 
Scientists at the Venaria Center have done scientific analysis to study the materials with which gamelan is made.
The restorers reinforced the structure of the musical instruments. 
They didn't make the musical instruments work again because some parts were too ruined. 
They placed the gamelan in an anoxic chamber (oxygen-free chamber used to eliminate wood-eating insects).
They cleaned the gamelan of dust. 
They inserted pieces of wood into the very damaged parts to reinforce the structure of the gamelan. 
In the end they painted the parts of missing color to make all surfaces uniform.

 

 

 

Abstract of the intervention:

Restoration

The Gamelan (percussion musical instrument) belongs to the culture and geographical area of West Java (Sunda), as evidenced in the volume edited by Luca Invernizzi and Alberto Cassio, who brought the material from Java to the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the University of Turin.
The restoration of the Gamelan consisted of a conservative intervention, aimed at restoring the legibility of the works by slowing down their degradation. After careful study of the work, it was decided not to re-functionalise the musical instrument and to keep all the elements present, original or traceable to previous interventions as historical evidence of the conservation events and the function of use of the artifact. The intervention was therefore mainly aimed at restoring the instrument’s static support. 
The intervention was accompanied by a diagnostic campaign aimed at deepening the knowledge of the constituent materials and identifying the wood species.
All parts have undergone disinfestation treatment prior to maintenance. The main operations performed on the artifact were the surface cleaning from dirt, taking care not to eliminate the original paint, and the structural consolidations (in particular on the bonang) and the pictorial film. Specific interventions have been carried out on some instruments. For the bonang, the strings were consolidated and for the gambang, the 18-note xylophone, the missing perimeter of the bottom was integrated. 
A chromatic integration was performed on all the instruments aimed at toning the gaps with visible support and making the reading of the polychrome surfaces more uniform and to tune the integrated parts ex novo.