International Conference

Dates: 15-17 April 2026
Location: Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS), Stellenbosch, South Africa

In-person only event. 

Decay unsettles the stabilising logics that underpin traditional heritage paradigms. It challenges the illusion of permanence, and introduces chaos into systems of order. Yet within this disorder lies generative potential: decay reveals interdependence, material transformation, and the dynamic life of objects. It resists dominant aesthetic and epistemic norms, offering spaces for alternative meaning-making, material negotiation, and epistemological expansion.

Decay, often synonymous with failure, ruin, or neglect, is typically framed within heritage discourses as a condition to be prevented, reversed, or mourned. This conference seeks to radically rethink this position, asking: What if, instead of opposing decay, we engage it as a critical and creative methodology, a process, aesthetic, and political gesture that reshapes how we understand value, memory, and care?