This chapter shows that curating art exhibitions in the form of social research can be a useful troubling, opening the ranges of what we may take anthropology to be, as much as reconfiguring the practice of ethnography. Here I reflect on the research conducted while curating the Life in Decline exhibition at the Estonian Mining Museum in 2021. In this project, artists were involved not simply as a reality check on my interpretations, but also as my co-ethnographers with whom to share analytical capacities and produce knowledge through experimental collaborations. One of the implications of this gesture is that the anthropologist not just makes arguments about artists in the field, but with them – introducing new representations into the social life that we are studying. Artists proved to be knowledge-makers themselves, co-ethnographers able to do field research and produce valuable analytical knowledge about local decline – by means of the elements of exhibition making.