Composting our practices (and organisations) through artist-led pedagogy

Abstract

Composting as a pedagogy is about cultivating a transformative practice, in and with community — for
relational and affective assembly. Thinking with composting as a pedagogic (and more-than-human)
metaphoric device, this article introduces composting our practices, an online pedagogical exchange
developed and facilitated by the author for the 2021 disorganising project. Included are conversations
shared between the author and practitioners who gathered to compost their practices — to ingest,
digest, and churn their practices — by collectively attuning to the rhythms and temporalities of practice,
including the chronic stress and cumulative impacts of operating under capitalist, neoliberal logics of
productivity, growth and expansion, job casualisation and precarity, and competitive and scarce
funding models. Our shared conversations are an offering to readers to forage what is useful to their
thinking. In doing so, we propose that you ask yourself: what aspects of your practice are transforming?
What needs to transform? And how might we be able to do this, at different scales, through shared
practices of reflexivity? Composting as a pedagogy is a situated, practical, and ongoing labour towards
the maintenance, repair, and where necessary and possible, decomposition and transmogrification of
our institutionalised habits and behaviours — including those we enact, knowingly or otherwise,
through the organisations in which our practices operate.