Linking past and present to better prepare for the challenges ahead is the privilege of cultural heritage. At its core, valuation, a process enabling a community to build on its social capital, questions how cultural heritage improves our common wellbeing beyond the legacy to future generations. Echoing a sense of belonging, participatory initiatives dedicated to tangible or intangible culture enhance social cohesion developing our common capacity to better prepare for undesirable developments. Challenging the logics of cultural heritage when viewed solely as an exhaustive list of infrastructures, the usage of argentic paper in the below work, darkening when exposed to light, is ideally suited to think about the meaning of passing time. Reconsidering a binary attitude, “Linking past and present” extends the definition of the word “heritage” to a conceptual approach questioning how the past can improve our daily lives.