I will trace my artistic research process for the project Decay Without Mourning: Future-thinking Heritage Practices, which revolves around the ruined surplus matter of the Hidden Years Music Archive that captures an alternative view of the South African music landscape between the 1960s and late 1990s reflecting countercultural impulses against apartheid. Before being donated to Stellenbosch University in 2013 this collection was subjected to detrimental factors of its informal storage conditions such as high humidity, temperature fluctuations, and the infiltration of fungi and mould, causing significant damage and deformation of its materials. While transferring the collection to the institute the principal archivist set aside a box for detritus including damaged photographic negatives, slides and audio reels; rusty staples and paperclips; hole-ridden and mouldy paper documents; and bottles of dust. This anarchival material brought up questions around value, aesthetics and meaning-making practices for the archivist and I, and thus provides the base for collaborative creative experiments to fuel our conceptual explorations of decay in relation to nature, culture, heritage and time. The first phase of research studied the visual traces of decay upon the actual materials, in collaboration with Jurie Senekal, to produce a series of lumen prints titled Spectres of Decay I (2023). These chance compositions in a time-based medium capture the spectral qualities of archival detritus as fabricated palimpsests that illuminate the trajectory of decay. The second phase studied the audible traces of decay, in collaboration with Dominique Edwards, to produce an interactive sound-sculpture titled Endling (2024). As our initial exploration of this cultural heritage was immaterialized (listening to digital audio files) we sought a counterpoint from a natural heritage site, the Cango Caves of the Western Cape, as a “living archive” of accrual to inform our sculpture-making.