Compost Lab: Materials of the everyday

Compost is a throwntogetherness of organic materials, just like a salad. To introduce the lab, we will invite the participants to co-create a salad bar. They are asked to bring either leftovers, or any items lingering in their fridges. As a soundtrack to the act of chopping up the vegetables and inventing recipes, out loud will be read as a prompt:

Listening to the prompt while preparing the food, eating while getting to know each other, we will digest the food by opening the conversation about the food we embody. From production to consumption, from nutrition to food waste, from compost to fertilizer,...and so on. What are we actually eating? What are we digesting? How to relate to the things we cut, chop, and throw together in a salad?

After the digestion of the food, we will engage in the practice of how to compost.

After all of this, our bodies might need a nap. Hence, we enter the dreamworld on the soundtrack to Earth, Wind, and Fire.

In revisiting the everyday acts of eating, daydreaming, and sleeping; we urge our participants to begin with a dream journal.

Composters, as we are by now, are invited to gather in a circle and share snippets from our dream diaries. Those could be a dreamed story, recurring themes, images, or colors. Venturing in our dream worlds, we ask what the materials are telling us? How do they tell of the soundscapes, landscapes of our emotions and desires? While knowledge production has been oriented to consciousness, in this session we attempt to tap into the intuitive dreamworld. The stories of the participants are in themselves a prompts for the group to either write/draw a reaction to the dream. Opening a door for conversation to arise across each others dreams.

Where do dreams belong in the material world, a world bounded by air, water, fire, and earth?

Composters are asked to focus on/record an everyday noise or sound and each send in a song during the week leading up to session three. Rather than trying to find meaning, the composters are prompted to hear rather the frequencies, the tempo, the rhythm, to touch upon the frequencies vibrating in their bodies. With every pulse, we breathe. With every word, we send out a frequency. The session is orientated to experiments with sound waves.

As an introduction to air, we initiate the air session by breathing and humming exercises Possibly singing while allowing both the dissonance and harmony to collide, glitch, and slide.We also might scream from our belly and note the vulnerability that comes along with acts of release. Followed by a period silence where we do simply nothing, but breathe.

Then we can listen to a mixtape of the recorded sounds coupled with the songs. Closing with our capacity to see, we open up to seeing through our ears. Also opening the space for a conversation, and possibly the common themes in our shared tapestry of sound.

This tapestry lead us to draw sound? How to draw sounds of imagination?

The composters are asked to delve into their kin relationships across generations to explore the witches of the family. There is always an aunt or grandmother around to tell you to put cloves in your mouth when in tooth pain, or to tell you to clean your stove with apple cider vinegar and baking soda. They might even have something to say about, yes indeed, compost. Instead of haunting the witch down, we embrace in this session the herbal world. All in all telling of the everyday wonders of material relationships or in other words; on how to make kin beyond babies.

After an immersion in witch knowledges, we will continue the session by simply meditating with needles and hooks crocheting and knitting, while listening to Donna Haraway.

Chaos theory describes the qualities of the point at which stability moves to instability or order moves to disorder. For example, unlike the behavior of a pendulum, which adheres to a predictable pattern a chaotic system does not settle into a predictable pattern due to its nonlinear processes. In his lecture Sapolsky talks about the history of Chaos Theory and reductionism in science, where taking apart components of a complex system doesn't add up to the sum of its parts.

In this session we are invited to think about the application of chaos in the everyday. It opens up the space to imagine a set of possibilities in a far unknown future. For instance, we can try to imagine distant futures, new and old of post-human world, work and post-apocalyptic scenarios.

Composters need to feel the earth. Prompted to explore the earth on barefoot, the composters jump into every opportunity leading up to the session to take of their shoes. This way, we can explore our footprint. Composters’ bodies on the move, squate while reposing rather than to sit on a chair. In this session, we focus on embodiment of moving through the elements of earth, wind, and fire. Therefore, we will dance our way through it.

We get together to work with our materials to create our zine and check the progress of the compost and possibly take it home with us to fertilize our craving plants.