This paper revisits two of our previous engagements with things that would conventionally be categorized as waste. Our curatorial experiments with this waste material explored their epistemological, aesthetic and ethical potentials, but in this paper, we wish to discuss what happens to the value of disposable things as an ontological category if we begin to pay attention to them, care for them and even repurpose them. We do this by drawing on our previous work with such ontological misfits, respectively Insignificants (Sørensen) and fringe objects
(Grünfeld). Insignificants was a collection and exhibition experiment taking place between 2019 and 2020. The format of the exhibition series was deliberately neglectable, limited to a small bell jar. Inside the jar, a selection of things dislodged from cultural-historical relations were exhibited in an effort to stage new encounters and explore the aesthetic and epistemic qualities of insignificant things. While fringe objects share a similar ontological status as insignificant and neglectable, they differ in one important respect as the term refers specifically to things already residing in a museum collection, yet located at its margins as byproducts of the collecting practice. Fringe objects embody cultural historical relations but curators have deemed them disposable because such relations are too weak or unimportant. However, through a transdisciplinary exhibition experiment at Medical Museion – The Living Room – involving more-than-human actors, fringe objects became important ingredients in the making of metabolic things, thus evolving as sites for an uncertain disposal beyond museum binaries such as accessioning/deaccessioning. In each their own way, Insignificants and fringe objects left us perplexed about their future trajectories. When our experiments ceased, it became particularly pertinent for us to explore the futures of the things we had curated. We end this paper discussing these excessive endings and how their uncertainties called for us to do slightly weird and unsettling things. For example, at the end of the experiment in 2020, Insignificants were formally buried (rather than discarded), but eventually the interred objects happened to be re-excavated, forming a new and unexpected curatorial context. Meanwhile, an installation of fringe objects was excavated in 2023 only to pose further problems as it turned into an unruly thing, dispersing well beyond the confines of its installation case. These experiences prompt us to consider how the effects of paying attention to, caring for and repurposing such mutable things turns the already chronically unstable category of the disposable into an ontological misfit of its own: the in/disposable.