NICOLA DEANE

Dominique Edwards and I were given the task to generate an artwork for the research project, Decay Without Mourning: Future Thinking Practices, supervised by Lizabé Lambrechts, the archivist responsible for the transfer of the Hidden Years Music Archive that was donated by David Marks to Stellenbosch University in 2013. The materials we were invited to respond to were the ruined remains of the institutionalisation of this personal collection – considered obsolete, too damaged or too dangerous to keep – including rusted staples and paperclips, hole- and mould-ridden papers, warped tapes and defaced negatives.

Decayed detritus like this falls outside the celebrated values within typical cultural heritage collecting and preserving practices, so although these compromised materials were considered too broken to save, Lambrechts felt they were too charged to throw away. She gathered and stored them in what she referred to as “the decay archive” – a parallel archive of ruined fragments – anarchival artefacts with potential, to be studied and reflected on through artistic research.

These outcast objects, usually regarded as failures of preservation, were treated through an alternative lens, as active participants in the heritage process, inscribing their own histories of vulnerability, survival and transformation. In this light, they may shift one’s sense of what heritage is, not a static collection of intact objects, but a dynamic ecology of ongoing processes. As Tim Ingold argues, “the properties of materials, regarded as constituents of an environment, cannot be identified as fixed, essential attributes of things, but are processual and relational” (2011:30).

In this collaborative work a strange body emerges from an even stranger container. Referred to interchangeably as creature/critter, sculpture, artefact and mobile archive, Endling (2024) becomes not only a material object but a conceptual pivot through which multiple subject threads converge: memory, echo, cultural-liminal rituals, environmental ruination, co-creation, co-affection, glitch, decay, and sonic reanimation. As a sculptural form embedded in a mobile crate-like structure, the object is designed to emit sound triggered by movement and presence, which resonates literally and symbolically. Within this resonance is staged an encounter with the plangent echo of archival loss as signal for ecological mourning.

[Endling] is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.

T.S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton,’ in Four Quartets (1943)

A sense of something being ‘alive’ was important to us right from the start. We wanted to reach into the vastness of the archive, this dense collection of song and find something that spoke to the throat, something that sat in the chest. We engaged in a process that involved material exploration and hours of conversation for almost a year before the work came to us – something other than human.^{[1]Dominque Edwards interviewed by Jess Sutherland on the collaborative artwork: Endling (2024) by Edwards and Deane, in GNOSSIENNE (2025).}

The first public presentation of Endling (2024) was within the group exhibition, Vital Signs: The environment, loss & sustainability held at the Michaelis Gallery in Cape Town (17 September – 17 October 2024).

The awful sonic signal that Endling emits as soon as it is approached by the audience – Endling’s ‘speech’ – is irreducible to intelligible units. Endling, this black flocked tongue-in-the-box extended in a scream, thus embodies a semiotic wound. Speech here is decomposed into a collapse of language implicated as semiosonic decay (Kaganof 2025).^{[4]Review of Endling (2024) by Aryan Kaganof, 24 June 2025. Available: kinoki. (Accessed: 1 July 2025) Decaymentation as poetics.}

Trickster Logics and the Ludic Archive: Procession, Play, and the Perverse Echo

The trickster incarnates in every culture the oxymoronic imagination at play, literally ‘fooling around’ to discover new paradigms and even new logics (Pelton 1980:272).

The next presentation of the work, as a form of public intervention, took place on the 12 February 2025 as an invitation to: Walk with the Endling. With the rising of the Dassie moon,^{[7]The Dassie Moon is the full moon that falls in February that was named (by the Centre for Astronomical Heritage in South Africa) after the rock hyrax native to Africa, as an alternative to the Northern Hemisphere’s Snow Moon. In San mythology the dassie represents the wife of the shape-shifting trickster god |Kaggen who is most often represented as a praying mantis.} Edwards and I led a small procession as a meditation on time, loss and collective presence, with an improvised performance by Garth Erasmus on his handmade instrument accompanying the triggered sonic ruptures of Endling (2024) and our humming of the melody derived from decayed tapes of the archive. We walked from the storage rooms of the Hidden Years Music Archive, as the site that called Endling into being, to the atrium of the Stellenbosch University Museum, where the concert titled Hypha^{[8]A set of compositions by Cara Stacey that responded to the same decaying materials of the archive.} was performed.

Lambrechts introduced the artwork and project context to those gathered to do the walk, before inviting them to accompany us in humming the ‘decay lullaby’ en route, she says:

Like crumbling paper and forgotten voices, Endling stands at the edge of time a bridge between memory and absence. In walking beside it, we acknowledge its existence, and we offer solidarity against oblivion. Endling is not solely a marker of finality or endings but is also a herald of beginnings connecting what was, what is, and what may come to be. This is more than a walk; it is an act of defiance against forgetting.

Artistic research, I would like to argue, potentiates access to different ontologies in mediating varied modes of engagement with an object or subject as it reconfigures the conditions of perception. For example, the heightened perceptual state of enchantment as an altered mode of attention, may allow access to another state of being where the world feels charged with meaning, agency and relational presence, even for those who do not inhabit that space normally. Accordingly, artistic research may create temporary thresholds for alternative encounters and exchanges across diverse ontological registers. The artwork or performance thus enables a “liminoid”^{[9]What anthropologist Victor Turner identified – in industrialised society’s reception of cultural phenomena – as correspondent to the liminal phases of the rites of passage rituals of tribal societies, that provide the necessary channels for suspending or transcending the mundane: “today’s liminoid is yesterday’s liminal” (1977:46).} experience for its spectators.

If Endling proposes an archive, it is not one built on order and preservation, but on transgression, play, movement and renewal. The practice of wheeling the sculpture through different spaces, each encounter triggered by audience proximity, movement and ritual revealing, does not evoke the solemn stillness of institutional archives, but rather a playful disruption.

Here, the figure of the trickster brings into focus Endling‘s ludic logic. In the context of Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of folk humour, the trickster is aligned with the carnivalesque: an inversion of norms, the breakdown of hierarchies, the grotesque body that laughs at power. He describes the carnival as “the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal,” and that this carnival experience, “opposed to all that was ready-made and completed, to all pretense at immutability, sought a dynamic expression; it demanded ever changing, playful, undefined forms” (1984:10-11).

Endling, with its ambiguous form and necro-sonic utterances, operates as a kind of posthuman trickster-archive, resisting legibility and stability. Like the Trickster, Endling disrupts stable meaning: it is at once a funerary object and an active/activated presence. It harbours decay yet activates sonic vibration, it holds memory yet resists containment. Its responsive sound loop triggered by bodily presence becomes a threshold mechanism, to reveal, unsettle and reconsider. It is not a  passive container of the past, but a disruptive code-bearer, entangling entropy, rhythm and memory into new affective circuits.

This playful perversity recalls Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, as he notes, “the terrors of childhood, open-hearted gaiety, mystic fantasy and sacred awe are all inextricably entangled in this strange business of masks and disguises” (1955:13). He goes on to assert that in play “we may move below the level of the serious, as the child does; but we can also move above it – in the realm of the beautiful and the sacred” (1955:19). Endling engages its audience through a gamified logic of proximity, response, and uncertainty. The artefactual crate may or may not react as the cackle-call may or may not be triggered. The artwork calls for an open-ended, ludic engagement with participants. It is part oracle, part machine, part prank.

The ludic openness of Endling is also political: a resistance to the professionalisation and bureaucratisation of artistic labour at universities that promotes efficiency, predictability and instrumental outcomes.

Claire Bishop considers it essential to think of art “not as part of a seamless continuum with contemporary labour, but as offering a specific space of experience where those norms are suspended and put to pleasure in perverse ways” (2012:238). Rather than reproducing prevailing social logics, the artwork prompts a liminoid condition in which the dominant assumptions become temporarily inoperative. Within the Decay without Mourning context, this suspension extends to the preservationist imperatives that govern archival practice. The artwork establishes a threshold through which deterioration, instability and material decomposition cease to signify failure and emerge instead as generative, relational and affective processes.

Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) theorisation of borderlands is useful in thinking of Endling as a threshold entity. Its body – tongue, crate, sound – is a mestiza archive,^{[10]The archive as dynamic process: The “mestiza archive” is not a fixed collection of texts or artifacts, but rather a way of engaging with history and identity that is constantly evolving and being reinterpreted.} formed at the crossings of gender, ecology, memory, and decay. Its voice cracks and stutters, speaking from in-between: between mourning and meaning, between scream and silence.

In many ways, the trickster logics of Endling return us to the principles of improvisation and embodied knowledge. Its gesture is circular, looping, stuck in a feedback system that insists on repetition as method. Through its travelling form, Endling destabilises the assumptions of static meaning, linear time, and fixed identity. If Endling has a language, it is one spoken from the ruins.

Endling, a wake (2025) is a video essay documenting the procession and temporary placement of Endling within the context of the Stellenbosch University Museum. It was screened at the Decay Without Mourning: Future-thinking Heritage Practices conference at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study on 16 April 2026.

Conclusion: Towards a Compost Archive

Cultural remembering proceeds not through reflection on a static memorial remnant but through a process that slowly pulls the remnant into other ecologies and expressions of value, accommodating simultaneous resonances of death and rebirth, loss and renewal (DeSilvey, 2017:35-36).

Artistic research through practice-led experimentation with light-sensitive photographic processes, microbial traces, obsolete materials, corroded fragments and sonic ruins, considers decay as a speculative medium (Gineprini, 2025) – one that prompts the archive to exceed its own taxonomies and to speak (other codes) through its margins. Within these fragile thresholds where preservation yields to transformation, decay insists that every ending already carries within it the pattern of another beginning, and continuous becoming. In her “postpreservation” discussion on collaborating with entropy to curate deeper relations to cultural memory, DeSilvey (2017:142) directs us to some poignant lines of T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” (1948:58): 

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

This artistic research bears a post-archival, or composting-logic that embraces decay as a generative aesthetic and methodological condition through which new relations between matter, memory and perception may emerge. While the lumen prints activate the latent agencies of deteriorating and expired materials, Endling translates sonic entropy into embodied, rhythmic encounter. Together they propose a rethinking of the archive as a composting ecology in which images, sounds, materials and bodies remain in continual processes of transformation, instead of a stable repository of fixed histories. Through decay, procession, play and care, the work cultivates forms of attention that resist the preservationist impulse to fix content and meaning. Instead, it invites viewers into a liminoid encounter with matter in which decomposition becomes a condition of relation rather than loss.

This work characterises part two of Deane’s postdoctoral research for the project, part one resides in the gallery section and can be accessed here.   

Acknowledgements | This work was supported by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond [GI21-0001].