Generative Repair and Graceful Decay: Interview with Caitlin DeSilvey

Professor Caitlin DeSilvey works as a cultural geographer and lecturer at the University of Exeter. Her work explores the ways in which built environments change through aging, including processes of repair, decay, and wasting. She collaborates with photographers, architects, designers, repairers, heritage practitioners, and with students in her teaching. DeSilvey fosters sensibilities of how to collaborate with the buildings and structures that ‘tell us what they need’, and with the living ecologies that contribute to the transformation of these decaying matters, ‘to allow them space in the future’ of these environments. Caitlin DeSilvey is the author of Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving (University of Minnesota Press, 2017); a co-author of Heritage Futures: Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices (UCL Press, 2020); and a co-editor of After Discourse: Things, Affects, Ethics (Routledge, 2020).