The Poiesis of Composting
Curators: Guilherme Maggessi, Rafał Morusiewicz
Artists: Gleb Amankulov, Valerie Ludwig, Tabea Marschall, Mzamo Nondlwana, Abiona Esther Ojo, Danielle Pamp, Laura Sperl, Miriam Stoney und Selina Shirin Stritzel and guest contributions by Rebecca Jane Arthur, Cana Bilir-Meier, Masha Godovannaya, Kollektiv Sprachwechsel, Lydia Nsiah, Anna Spanlang et al.
The ethics of artistic practice and research, bridging art’s politicality with its affectivity, shapes the process of its material emergence. If understood as humanity’s exteriorization and “an object of fundamental encounter,” art calls for transdisciplinary and intersectional approaches that recognize the environmental totality and “radical material processuality” of its ongoing flux between production and decomposition.
Engaging with multiple gestures of “composting,” the exhibition The Poiesis of Composting presents artistic positions that rethink pre-existing material (found-footage, archives). It imagines situations of queer temporalities and rhizomatic relational synchronicities that, after being composed, become compost/ed. Approximating the non-linear temporality of composting, the exhibition focuses on thinking multiple and changeable positionalities of the artworks, which move towards each other, across time and space, and eventually merge, bit by bit, into a “bio-mess” of their conceptual micro-nutrients.
The presented artworks negotiate with what is already there by unmaking it and telling stories of a seemingly known “past-present”: by doing so, they imagine a “pleasant future.” The Poiesis of Composting puts to practice a queer historiographic methodology in transdisciplinary and intersectional artistic research and practice, placing its focus on navigating spaces between doing and undoing, embracing the radical material processuality of its thinking subject as always “in-becoming.”