HOW TO USE COMPOSTING
The Compost is a place for ‘composting’ – a process which aims to fertilize the specific ground where curatorial methods and practices in the performing arts take place. It’s a place where certain problems, or approaches to them and beyond, are critically reflected from the perspective of performing arts in different socio-political and economic contexts and are addressed in relation to activism, social movements and self-organization.
Why composting, rather than just producing or creating knowledge? The idea to work with ‘composting’ makes it possible to imagine sharing and exchanging materials and resources with a wide range of experiences and knowledge produced inside and outside the usual academic context. To engage in composting means to share interests, knowledge and experiences on curating, and to let ’the compost’ work as a co-existing and co-creative space for a multitude of perspectives, simultaneously negotiating what this process will do, or become.
Composting also means dealing with various materials, even those regarded as waste products (scraps, non-sequiturs, hints), whose aim is not simply to add-up to the already existing edifice of curatorial knowledge. Composting is opening, rather than defining, transgressing rather than categorizing; it is a process of never-ending negotiation between interested parties (or actors) whose stakes differ and change as they enter in the new relations with each other. Therefore, its results are not closed and fixed items of knowledge or (curatorial) science, but the tools for engagement with arising problems which emerge in every new constellation of actors.
As a start kit for the compost we have asked our colleagues from the project, curators, theoreticians, artists and art collectives that we are inspired by, to contribute with a text which unfolds a concept, or some of their questions or inquiries which they find interesting to relate to a curatorial field or knowledge. In addition to these texts we have documented a few trajectories for entering the compost; concrete methods to engage in composting.
You are invited to join the composting process. You will engage in a process of developing, reshaping, reusing and recycling of the knowledge and information in the compost. You can start a dialogue with a text or a concept offered here, or speculate about things or perspectives you cannot find in there. You can invent new concepts, or insert new methods on how to stir the compost. You can share references, books, texts, videos, photographs, archive material or any other material that you find enriching to the “composting” milieu.
If you are interested in taking part of the composting process, please contact composting@curatingincontext.com. When contributing to the compost with an item (a text in an open file) you’ll be asked to share what method you have used in order to get to this item. The description of your method will also be included in The Compost.
