Conservation after Permanence: Decay, Critical Ethics and the Future of Heritage

Conservation in the West has long been bound to ideals of permanence, stability and continuity—tenets increasingly untenable amid ecological precarity, political volatility and shifting ontologies of cultural value. In recent artistic practices, especially body-based performance and perishable media, these ideals become even more strained: their dependence on bodies, gestures and duration resists the material preservation frameworks inherited from object-based traditions. Similarly, contemporary Indigenous care privileges participatory engagement with cultural objects over their fossilization within institutions. Drawing on conservation discourses of “managing” and “sanctioning” change (Laurenson, Muñoz-Viñas, Hölling) alongside insights from ethnographic conservation (Clavir, Sully), I argue that conservation must also be reimagined through the lens of decay—beyond the comfort of change that still remains “retreatable” or “reversible” and away from the exceptionalism of human agency.

This paper approaches decay and decomposition not as loss or failure but as a generative methodology. It argues that decay—conceived as material process, affective condition and epistemic tool—unsettles the stabilizing logics of Western conservation. Rather than fixing an “original” work, engaging decay foregrounds irreversible change, dispersal and disappearance as integral to an artwork’s life—whether in body-based performance, a can of Flux Mystery Food (Fluxus food edition, 1960s), or a performative Kwakwaka'wakw potlatch mask. Drawing on three Swiss Research Council–funded projects—Critical Conservation (2025–30), Activating Fluxus (2022–26) and Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge (2020–25)—and grounded in extensive ethnographic research, the paper examines how practices of “letting go” and “holding lightly” emerge as acts of care. Here, decay is not abandonment but a critical custodial ethic—one that embraces fragility, improvisation and partial transmission as modes of responsibility in multispecies worlds.

The argument unfolds across three interrelated dimensions. First, it considers the temporalities of decay, showing how works—always already changing, transitory and in dissolution— destabilize linear models of historical transmission. Whereas conservation traditionally preserves the past for the future—thus affirming and simultaneously troubling time’s linearity by privileging the “original” or “authentic” instance—decay operates insistently in the present. Through decay, heritage emerges as transtemporally convival, producing affinities across species, space and time and generating radical futurities rather than remaining bound to fixed pasts. Second, it turns to the material politics of decay, asking what it means that some artworks and cultural objects—particularly performances or practices from precarious, resistant, or marginalized contexts—are permitted to disintegrate, while others are meticulously conserved, materially “halted,” and exuberantly documented (Hölling, Pelta Feldman & Magnin). Decay here exposes infrastructures of neglect, but also gestures of refusal and resilience. Third, it develops an ethics of dissolution, proposing that conservation be reimagined not as protection against decay but as accompaniment within it—a post- preservation practice of response-able being-with transformation. This approach recognizes decay as the product of multiple agencies and as a process that can be narrated, aesthetically engaged and materially mobilized.

The embrace of decay thus marks a political and ethical reorientation: one that challenges hegemonic frameworks of preservation and advocates for a heritage practice grounded in fragility, attentiveness and care. It aligns with decolonial critiques seeking to undo the violence of archival and museological permanence, and with ecological epistemologies that affirm regenerative cycles of transformation and renewal. Reframed as a method, decay reveals the “object of conservation” as a baffling nature culture hybrid and positions heritage not as an end-state but as an ongoing, relational process—a continuation by other means, open to contingent presents and emergent futures.