Binding the Archive invites you to take part in a collaborative artwork made from deaccessioned material from the Hidden Years Music Archive, one of South Africa’s most important collections of popular music history. Using damaged, time-worn archival pages, participants collectively build a growing paper tapestry through acts of binding, folding, soaking, weighting, and tying.

These papers bear the marks of their past: humidity, insects, mould, handling. Rather than repairing them, we lean into their altered state. Pages are worked while damp, compressed and layered so that ink bleeds, text dissolves, and fragments – names, dates, rehearsal notes – briefly surface before slipping away again. Meaning emerges not through reading, but through touch, time, and material change.

No special skills are needed. Your contribution might be as simple as pulling thread through an imperfect hole, tying a knot (or leaving it loose), adding weight, or binding around an existing fragment. Over time, these small gestures accumulate. Spines warp, sections tighten or sag, and the work is shaped as much by water, gravity, and decay as by human hands.

This is an archive in motion – unstable, overfull, and resistant to fixed order. Binding the Archive proposes decay not as loss, but as a creative force. History doesn’t disappear here; it reorganises.

The workshop forms part of Decay without Mourning: Future Thinking Heritage Practices, an international artistic research project exploring how heritage can be reimagined when deterioration is acknowledged, engaged, and allowed to shape new forms.

Click here to reserve your free spot.