for Queer Ecologies
Compost
Maurício Chades, The Human Humus Fertilizer Tutorial, 2022–ongoing. Installation of living systems sculptures populated by fungi, earthworms, and bacteria. Human hair, woodchips, plastic buckets, clay, digital video © Maurício Chades
Compost is decayed organic material, highly nutritious to plant life, which is created by the metabolic activity of decomposers, agents of the transit of matter between life and death including bacteria, fungi, worms, and insects. Humans are not decomposers when they excrete and flush, but they can become decomposers when they actively partner with a multitude of nonhuman organisms to facilitate the recycling of organic waste—when they become compostists.[i]
Composting is practiced when a hole or box is filled with a layer of food waste, rich in nitrogen, covered by another layer of carbon-rich material such as dried leaves, woodchips, or cardboard Amazon boxes. Nitrogen and carbon layers are piled up to form an airy and moist “lasagna,” ideal for the proliferation of microorganisms and, consequently, fermentation. Over the course of months, organisms in the composting system eat and excrete, breaking down available food into increasingly smaller parts. Fine black humus and dark-colored “tea” can eventually be collected, which can replace industrial fertilizers in your vegetable garden (a recommended practice to prepare for food shortages promised by global warming).
Composting teaches the ecosystemic value of soils, proving that healthy ecosystems are managed by countless actors. A biodiverse soil is a living entity with many mouths, many intestines, and many holes. [see HOLES ] If we all became compostists, we would not be spared from climate catastrophes to come, but critical adaptations could be achieved on material and philosophic levels. Compostists learn to think of life and death as deeply intertwined, observing the transformation of waste into food for invisible beings whom they come to appreciate as agents of deeptime and renewal. Compostists actively prepare for a future of precarity by building alliances with a diversity of species that share their desire for vitality. Composting fosters symbiotic relationships that reshape the perspectives of those who engage with it daily. It brings them into coexistence with unexpected kin—beings separated from us by time and scale, yet integral to the fabric of a shared reality.
[i] Donna Haraway introduces the term “compostist” as an alternative to “postmodern” in Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulhucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 144–168.
Maurício Chades with QuERC, 2023