Sustainable Decay. On the Materiality of Transience

Omnia transeunt Everything passes away. What was once considered a baroque wisdom about the transience of all earthly things now sounds like a grim diagnosis of our times. Species extinction, burning forests, melting glaciers planetary decay is part of our everyday reality. At the same time, we encounter the uncanny opposite of this decay: microplastics that do not decompose for centuries, or nuclear waste that continues to emit radiation for millennia. It seems that transience itself is becoming a utopian desire. The volume Nachhaltig vergänglich. Zur Materialität des Verfalls (Sustainable Decay: On the Materiality of Transience) is dedicated to the contradictions of an era in which awareness of finitude is being renegotiated between decay and preservation, loss and hope. What does transience mean in a world that is simultaneously aging too quickly and passing too slowly? How does our thinking about matter, value, and time change when even garbage becomes a monument? In interdisciplinary contributions from the fields of art, art history, philosophy, and cultural studies, this volume examines the relationship between finitude and eternity, decay and preservation. The authors explore the materials that outlive us and those that disintegrate. They shed light on the life cycle of materials from decomposing bioplastics to eternally durable chemicals and show how we deal with them. How do perishable materials become raw materials? What reactions do decaying works of art provoke? What remains do they leave behind? Will fungi be our saviors? And what is actually sustainable for whom? Sustainability is not as innocent a concept as its current usage might suggest. Originating in German forestry science, the term has a long history of controlling and exploiting nature for economic gain. Today, it has become a mantra whose meaning and purpose are often vague. By examining various phenomena of preservation and transformation understood as sustainable in terms of their ecological impact, the contributions in Sustainabe Decay: On the Materiality of Transience also provide a much-needed critique of the ubiquitous concept of sustainability.