Ronald Kolb
Post-Exhibitionary Practice

https://oncurating-space.org/compost-bin

https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/composting-knowledge/

A sequential and choreographed series of interlocking exhibitions, workshops, dinners, lectures, and performances on the topic of „composting knowledge“.
Main organizers: Ronald Kolb, Camille Regli, Dorothee Richter

11 March–12 June 2022 – OnCurating Project Space, Zurich
18 June – 25 September 2022 – documenta fifteen, Composting Knowledge Space, Hafnerstraße 2, Kassel

With A_O_S_A_A; Augmented Materiality Lab (Alvaro Cassinelli, Jayson Haebich, Eugenia S. Kim); Paloma Ayala; Mabe Bethônico; Lara Caluori; Line Chevalley; Leticia Cordero; Club La Fafa; Emma Critchley; Mekhala Dave; Donkey Mill Art Center with James Jack and Mina Elison; Liz Elton; f.f.f.f.f.fermentation; Anne-Laure Franchette; Matthias Fritsch; Eco-Greenhouse / Ein Shemer Kibbutz Project with Nivi Alroy; Andre Vladimir Heiz; Anim Jeon; Stefanie Knobel and Samrat Banerjee / Institute for Plant, Animal and Human Migration; Alina Kopytsia; Malte Larsen; Marinka Limat; Hunter Longe; Ayumi Matsuzaka; Maya Minder; Mayté Miranda; Jonathan Ospina; Marisa Raygoza; Simon Risi; Salo & Lucianne; Andreas Siagian; Daniel Späti; Stirnimann-Stojanovic; Teti Group with Gabriel Gee; U5 with Helene Romakin; Paula Vilaplana Miguel; Raffaele Vitto; Claudia Vogel; David Zabel; and Adam Zaretsky.

Curatorial team: Nadine Bajek, Chiara Borgonova, Ana Rosela del Bosque, Giulia Busetti, Valeria Brücker, Sophie Brunner, Maryna Donina, Olena Iegorova, Erika Giulietti, Sofia Gkinko, Ronald Kolb, Anna Konstantinova, Ronny Koren, Camille Regli, Dorothee Richter, Alexandra Romy, Anita Rosenberger, Smadar Samson, Regina Tetens, Lotte van Ermengem, Anna Wälli

COMPOST—The Open Bin responded to the “Composting Knowledge” network for documenta fifteen, which explored collaborative alternatives to established systems of knowledge production. At the OnCurating Project Space, composting became both a material process and a cultural-political method for combining different practices, experiences, and forms of expertise. Through a modular, evolving programme of exhibitions, screenings, dinners, performances, talks, and roundtables, artists, collectives, students, researchers, and visitors contributed to a shared process of learning, transformation, and joyful resistance.

The exhibitionary project consisted of around thirty individual events – social in nature, including screenings, dinners, roundtables, exhibitions, performances and lectures, all open to the public and accessible in a digitally hybrid format for its whole duration. It ran on for almost fourteen weeks with around 50 participating artists until the opening of documenta fifteen. The whole project was organised by about 20 curators and organisers and was borderline overwhelming for us and our team.

Excerpt from
Curating as Governmental Practices. Post-Exhibitionary Practices under Translocal Conditions in Governmental Constellations
Ronald Kolb, Published dissertation, May 2024
https://www.on-curating.org/book/curating-as-governmental-practices-post-exhibitionary-practices-under-translocal-conditions-in-governmental-constellations.html

Compost Practice as an Ecological Theme
In terms of direction, the topic of composting clearly drew from ecology. Practising ecological thinking did not only mean dealing with natural phenomena or drawing attention to the imminent climate catastrophe but was expressed in artistic-scientific research and governmental-curatorial presentations in the interdependent field of more-than-human relations and environments. Often not explicit, many artists demonstrated experimentally and playfully how a more sustainable and ecological life could be possible with a particular ecological and scarcity-aware practice.
For example, artist-scientist Lara Caluori installed a small water tank with oil and added the fungal mycelium that would, over time, degrade the toxic waste into non-toxic substances in the process of “mycoremediation”.[1]

Another workshop-based contribution by artist Claudia Vogel experimented with actual compost material. Vogel distilled compost in different ways. She used it to create dyes on paper and also distilled the waste for olfactory workshops, to sensitise the participants to smell and taste.[2] In a similar but more sophisticated process, artist Liz Elton produced large “landscape paintings”, all made of compostable material, using recycled bags as a canvas and pigments from various degradable sources.[3] The lecture and discussion by Nivi Alroy on the “Eco-Greenhouse” of Kibbutz Ein Shemer, Israel, founded by artist Avital Geva, showed us an interesting case study where ecological issues intersect with social issues through the establishment of an educational and social centre on the topic of ecological sciences developed through artistic practice.[4] By far the biggest contribution on ecological issues in the programme came from the activities of Humus Sapiens, a network of Maya Minder and others. The very active DIYbio network transformed the exhibition space with artistic works and scientific installations and further activated it with a panel discussion on DIY composting practices by Malte Larsen, Maya Minder, Linda Mary Montano, Andreas Siagian and Adam Zaretsky.[5] The panel discussion was accompanied by fermented food and drinks made by Maya Minder.

In addition to the direct contact with ecological issues of the natural environment and humans’ relationship with it, the project dealt with what I would call the governmental aspect of ecology – (self-)reflective research into our interdependence with the world. It was based on the basic understanding of ecology – as in the Greek oikos for “home” or “household”, and logos as in the Greek for “study” – as a scientific discipline to research “the relationships between organisms and their environment”.[6] On this matter, many projects talked about soil, earth, ecosystems and composting as a natural process in which humans can intervene and of which they are part.

Composting Knowledge as Epistemological Reflection
In terms of an expanded understanding of ecology and composting, I had already indicated in the initial correspondence with the artists that the project imagines “composting” not only as a natural process, a transformation process of digestion and fermentation in direct contact, but also sees the metaphorical notion of composting as a “wild” coming together of artistic, cultural and political articulations and knowledges, reflecting upon epistemologies. However, this idea of “compost” is not only a metaphorical exercise but extends to the basic idea of ecology as research into our own environmental and social embeddedness, expanding on our limiting idea of “economy” today. Similarly, yet in juxtaposition, the notion of economy – like ecology – stems from the Greek oikos as in “home/household” with the variant suffix nomos referring more to the managerial aspects of governance. In our current understanding of (neoliberal) economics, this usually means being occupied with a profit-oriented exchange of goods and its supporting legal framework for asymmetric transactions that externalise the devastating aspects of exploitation, such as pollution, overuse and poverty. Setting up this opposition, ecology and thus composting as an artistic-scientific practice would speak of techniques of governing, as a connective practice in scientific thought, since it is not only about managing the “home/household” but also about self-critically reflecting on one’s own position on a planetary scale in order to achieve a more inclusive and just world. In this expanded field of ecology, the structure of the “Composting Knowledge” network was set up as a “Compost Bin” or in other words, as a coming together of different epistemes in a contact zone.

Echoing Donna Haraway’s playful metaphor of compost as a heated, more-than-human assemblage of “each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles”,[7] she vividly argues for compost rather than posthumanism, culminating in the fiery quote “We are compost, not posthuman”.[8] Aside from being a major influence on posthuman discourse, I read her interjections as an exercise in not being afraid to stir things up and disrupt clear categorisations that are so crucial for universalistic disciplines. Our own amalgamation aimed to produce ideas of composting as a joyful resistance in socio-political practice, as a way of reflecting on epistemologies in a cultural-scientific field, and as a natural and direct-contact transformation process.

Exhibitions as Composting Practices
With this background, the project eventually invited artists and collectives with diasporic, transitory, deviant and fermenting practices to come together to explore composting practices literally and figuratively. The “MODULAR STRUCTURE” by the artist duo Stirnimann-Stojanovic gave us a structuring framework for all the different activities. They conceived and produced a flexible display system with recuperated wood from the Landesmuseum Zurich, which kindly provided us with the wooden remnants of their last exhibition. This versatile exhibition system was adapted for the events differently, creating seating and tables for workshops, elements for displaying artworks, stages, a bar, a DJ setup, and so on. Stirnimann-Stojanovic understood the “MODULAR STRUCTURE” as a work of art that needed to be taken care of, referring to the object’s life cycle.[9] Consequently, we managed to transport the display system to Kassel, where it was (re)used for the staging of the “Compost Network” for documenta fifteen. We also found a new home for the furniture after documenta; it will remain (for the time being) in an off-space in Kassel.

With this structure, we were able to stage very different events in terms of theme and content, but they were visually connected by the “MODULAR STRUCTURE”.

At the end of the exhibitionary project in Zurich on 11 June 2022, many artworks and residual installations from the previous events were still on display. On this day, Stefanie Knobel and Samrat Banerjee (Institute for Plant, Animal and Human Migration) staged their participatory performance “Training to Access Ecology as a Migratory System #2 – Oceanic entanglements” in the crowded exhibition space.[10] The performance, a mix of a theatrical play, lecture and workshop, involved the public in a theatre-like participation: the audience was asked to help install certain objects and was invited to take embodied actions. Thematically, the work asked about colonial entanglements in ecology from a local standpoint in Switzerland.

This event was followed by the hybrid “Loving Water Workshop” by James Jack and Mina Elison, from Donkey Mill Art Center, Hawaii.[11] Here, participants communally engaged in a deep listening exercise led by James Jack, who facilitated a sensitive exchange about the different situated relationships to water and the oceanic. I want to end with two more examples, highlighting the diverse contributions to this project, which could be seen as arbitrary programming. Club La Fafa, a diverse group working on migration and refugee experiences in Switzerland, hosted the informal gathering “How can we practice #radicalwelcoming?”[12] Over a cup of tea, an intimate exchange took place about the everyday experiences of refugees in Zurich, touching on topics such as law, culture and gender. It was no more than an evening of discussion, but an unusual encounter with people from different backgrounds and life experiences, where everyone had agency and was heard despite language barriers.

Finally, in a similar practice of convening, the performance/reading workshop “Mother Maiz” played out. “Mother Maiz” was performed by fffff (hosted by Leah Nehmert, Mariana Murcia and Laurie Mlodzik), an artist group experimenting with fermentation processes.[13] Perfectly combining the social gatherings in the exhibition’s contact zone with the more-than-human interplay of humans and bacteria in a fermentation process, the participants produced chicha through collaborative practice. Chicha is a maize beer that was and is traditionally made by masticating cooked corn and collecting the spit to let it ferment over time. The fermentation process is triggered by the saliva of the communal body, a bodily shared experience in the literal sense, producing a light alcoholic drink. For the workshop, fffff had prepared reading material. Participants took turns reading aloud, while the others chewed and collected the soaked corn. This encounter exemplifies the material-subjective conflation of what composting might offer. On the one hand, the communal gathering of a diverse group of people discussing postcolonial theory and literature in Zurich, Switzerland, demonstrates a governmental awareness of global interconnectedness; on the other hand, the gathering makes a more-than-human interdependence apparent (the bacteria are with us).

Composting (Knowledges) as a Curatorial Method
If one is ready to take the concept of “Composting Knowledge” seriously, one might arrive at a promising new understanding that makes visible the concurrency (or ubiquity?) of an ecologically motivated, interdependent, more-than-human approach and the self-critical, situated knowledge formations of the epistemic apparatus. This approach simultaneously addresses ecological consciousness (carbon footprint, production of waste, toxicity) and an epistemic violence still executed through exclusionary educational structures. Thus, to apply the practice of “Compost” and “Composting Knowledge” to the exhibitionary complex, its knowledge production and discourse, is to create exhibitions as a lively and living contact zone – an assemblage full of bodies, minds and things – that enables critical and self-critical thinking together in non-representational practice, a collective-governmental thinking that is aware of the level of representation, an encounter aware of its more-than-human environment. Compost as a method of curating thus means dealing with many different and differing elements in an ever-changing space of contact, arbitrary, unclear, chaotic, confusing constellations and open outcomes. This method also must find answers for “toxic” elements. Ideally, only preferred waste and scraps should enter a compost pile, but in reality, a total control of access cannot be sustained; a certain “chaos” needs to be embraced. Returning to our exhibition project, we had heated moments of friction. In a well-established exhibitionary tradition of singling out artworks in a neat spatial constellation of objects and things, artists are used to finding a defined space for their artworks that is separate from the works of other artists. In our experimental exhibition project, which followed a curatorial method of “composting”, there were constantly changing set-ups, with new works added almost every week, and the remnants of performances left in the space. Some artists embraced this principle of digestion and were willing to expose their work in quite unconventional ways, often beyond their control. Others felt frustrated and demanded that room be made for their work (which is also an appropriate dynamic for a compost pile). One group of artists even cleared out the space to install their own group show, which rather breaks with the idea of a “growing” exhibition with interchanging elements on display. This was an uncontrolled insertion that is still a reaction within the rules of a wild compost.

Composting Knowledges as an Epistemic Method
The representation and reproduction of specific knowledges in educational apparatuses are structurally similar to exhibition-making. What keeps specific knowledge formations on display has much to do with the legitimation processes of the knowledge system itself, that is, with the introspection into epistemic formations. Being critical towards a learned and trained epistemic rationale, crucial questions towards knowledge production have to put forward: not only what stories are told, but also, who can tell the stories that one gets to see in the exhibition? What can we learn in museums and in schools, and how do we learn? What sources do we have access to, and which ones are neglected? The rules and infrastructure of learning environments are always connected to the larger fields of politics and power. These infrastructures of knowledge necessarily produce exclusions (exclusion in terms of representation in the museum, in academia, in politics…), but when the field of knowledge production becomes fossilised and no longer allows for any dynamic exchange of legitimised subjects, we can speak of what Gayatri Spivak has called “epistemic violence”. Violent epistemic structures deny categorical access to certain themes, topics and subjects. Spivak defined this term in the context of Subaltern Studies, within a larger framework that hints at “a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity”.[14] This would be an episteme at work that constantly reproduces structural exclusion, as learning infrastructures often produce subjects in a certain way and exclude others through practices of othering, denying them the right to speak (publicly, scientifically, politically …). “Composting” as an epistemic metaphor of a wild, temporally uncontrolled, yet constantly self-regulating contact zone of shared knowledge production, where various snippets and loose ends, remnants and leftovers of partial and situated knowledges converge in heated surroundings, ready to be fermented – re- and de-constructed, hopefully to become digestible again.

Notes

[1] In full disclosure, this experiment did not work out. The fungus dried out and died due to a lack of caretaking by the organisers.

[2] https://oncurating-space.org/compost-retaste-2/.

[3] https://oncurating-space.org/compost-tender/.

[4] https://oncurating-space.org/compost-eco-greenhouse/.

[5] https://oncurating-space.org/compost-humus-sapiens/.

[6] „Ecology,“ Encyclopedia Britannica, last modified 26 December 2022, https://www.britannica.com/science/ecology.

[7] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 4.

[8] “We are compost, not posthuman; we inhabit the humusities, not the humanities. Philosophically and materially, I am a compostist, not a posthumanist. Critters  –  human and not  –  become-with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary developmental earthy worlding and unworlding.”
Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 97.

[9] https://oncurating-space.org/compost-opening/.

[10] https://oncurating-space.org/compost-oceanic-entanglements/.

[11] https://oncurating-space.org/compost-loving-water-workshop/.

[12] https://oncurating-space.org/compost-radicalwelcoming/.

[13] https://oncurating-space.org/compost-mother-maiz/.

[14] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 78.