In this paper, I explore the materiality, temporality, and decay of museum objects. Museums are grounded on a politics of death. Objects are removed from their living contexts and kept in a hypometabolic state to extend their lifespan. In this double movement of removal and preservation, objects are ideally reduced to dead matter stripped from the features of life and kept outside the forces of time. Taking on DeSilvey’s challenge ‘to think about what could be gained if we care for the past without pickling it’ this paper proposes a way out of the politics of death. Currently, at Medical Museion, we are developing a multispecies ‘living’ room that hosts life-processes, accentuates the intensity and plasticity of material processes and aims at rehabilitating the appreciation of the natural decay of things. In this paper, I explore what could be gained from this site ontologically, epistemologically and aesthetically drawing on practical and theoretical engagement with decay within the site. As I will argue, documenting the decay of things through multi-sensory methods (e.g. time lapse, sound art, lab protocol poetry) leads to a proliferation of things into multiple modes of existence (e.g. as food, shelter, poetry, images, sounds) that supports grotesque epistemological and aesthetic encounters with decaying things. Furthermore, such grotesque encounters become the driving force behind the development of a concept of metabolic things that accentuates the dynamic tensions (e.g. inside/outside, continuity/flux, build up/break down, energy/waste, growth/de-growth) of all things and unravel the temporal interface in-between thing and environment.