About

The conference will encompass the following thematic threads:

Decay draws attention to temporalities that exceed human timescales, situating heritage within geological and ecological frameworks. It resists finality, unfolding through slow dissolution, proliferation, and spectral persistence. How might heritage practices attend to material change across deep-time and nonhuman timescales?

Decay is a collaborative process wherein material breakdown is facilitated through fungi, bacteria, insects, humidity, and humans. What new forms of knowledge arise when heritage is understood through this lens as multispecies collaboration?

Decay is not evenly distributed. It gathers in the margins where systemic neglect, infrastructural collapse, and political disinvestment converge. Yet within these spaces, decay may also signal refusal, endurance, and transformation. What are the cultural and political meanings of decay in contexts marked by exclusion? What does decay reveal about the infrastructural, economic, and political conditions of heritage?

Decay softens rigid boundaries, facilitating the emergence of new forms, affects, and meanings. How might the softness of decay enable experimental modes of creation, sensing, and interpretation?

Decay challenges dominant frameworks of cultural value by foregrounding transience, relationality, and impermanence. What ethical frameworks emerge when impermanence is acknowledged as integral to cultural life?

Decay calls for alternative practices of care and custodianship that accept breakdown, nurture fragility, and attend to what is slowly transforming. What does it mean to care for materials that are decomposing? Whose values and aesthetics inform such acts of care?

Decay resists finality; there is no single moment of collapse. Instead, there are infinite endings opening the past for speculative and radical futures. How might heritage be reimagined as porous, participatory, and open to futures unforeseen?

Decay offers tools for disrupting archival and collecting violence, dominant aesthetics, and epistemic authority. It destabilises imposed order and opens space for unruly, plural, and insurgent narratives. How can decay function as a decolonial critique? Can decay become a decolonial method that unravels and reimagines heritage practices?

In many indigenous knowledge systems, decay is not seen as failure but as part of a cyclical continuum of life, renewal, and transformation. Such frameworks offer particular temporalities, ontologies, and custodial practices that differ from Western preservationist paradigms. How can indigenous epistemologies reshape our understanding of decay and its role in heritage practices? What does it mean to attend to decay within cosmologies that honour material transformation as an ontological condition of life?