Endling Wakes: Decay, Care, and the Sonic Archive as Eco-Ritual
Thursday, 16 April 2026
16:30
STIAS, Room 1
Abstract
This paper explores the artistic research of Nicola Deane and Dominique Edwards focused on the co-creation of the mobile (sonic) sculpture Endling (2024). Developed through a deeply reflexive and process-based practice, the project brings together critical themes from contemporary art, environmental humanities, decay studies, and archival theory. Drawing on a recording of the artists in conversation with the Decay without Mourning project leader Lizabé Lambrechts, this analysis investigates the symbolic resonance of the artefactual crate, the ritual of procession, the material language of decay, and the decentring of the archive. What emerges is an aesthetic ecology that listens to mourning, channels cultural memory, and rewilds curatorship through collaborative care and multimodal engagement practices.
Endling
Thursday, 16 April 2026
14:30
STIAS, Boardroom
Endling (2024) is a collaborative response to questions around decay in relation to compromised materials from the Hidden Years Music Archive at Stellenbosch University. In our attempt to represent the ‘vibrant matter’ from the hidden recesses of the archive that actively transforms its contents across time - erasing some layers of information as it builds other kinds, of the anarchival sort - we conceived of making something ‘alive’ that made a noise, a tangible carrier of a sonic ruin that could be engaged with before returning to its origin, the archive. To fulfil the works’ interventionist potential we designed it to be self-contained and mobile to travel through multiple public realms of cultural engagement, as in our performance of a ritualised procession from the Music Library to the open square of the Conservatoire to the University Museum. Fitted with a motion sensor, it calls out to passers-by when triggered. If explored further, the crate doors open, exposing a dense black cavity. Emerging from that void is a solid dark form that continues to call throughout this encounter. The sound of the call was sampled from a decayed audio file from within the Hidden Years archive.
Biography
Nicola Deane is an artist working with organic and digital materials to produce fine art and audiovisual installations. She obtained her BFA & MFA with distinction from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. In 2021 she was awarded a PhD in Visual Arts from Stellenbosch University for her project titled Decentering the Archive: Visual Fabrications of Sonic Memories, which explored a site of cultural heritage through a decolonial feminist lens and is published by the online cultural journal herri. She has performed, screened and exhibited her work nationally and internationally, and is currently a Postdoc Fellow of the Africa Open Institute working on the project Decay without mourning: future-thinking heritage practices.
Dominique Edwards is a visual artist based in Cape Town. She works primarily in drawing and sculpture. Her practice is concerned with processes that involve the shape-shifting and transmutation of material. Her sculptures suggest semiotic systems of their own – a relational cosmology familiar to an empathic memory of known bodies and objects.