Composting as artistic practice

Composting is a practice of soil renewal. As artistic practice, composting works and thinks through forms of belonging. It takes place in form of eco-social collaborations, investigating the relationship to land and multispecies encounter.

Origin Stories explores articulations, relations and narratives of belonging, and takes the conditions of exile and displacement—forced or voluntary—as a point of departure. Himself a migrant in the Netherlands, and coming from a family of exiles who fled the Spanish civil war and built a new life in Mexico, Gerardo Gomez Tonda brings together personal stories and research. This, together with the concrete challenge of finding belonging in a particular, physical space, opens up a performative stage for participation and collaboration. A flooded town, his family archive, a fish invasion, waste. These are some of the motives that invite the audience to participate in the work. These are some of the questions that guide his work: ‘Is it possible to rearticulate be/longings?’, ‘How to let go of the lingering smell of remote soils, and root ourselves in the here and now instead?, ‘How to treat toxic sites of belonging?’, ‘Can we imagine/build an inclusive form of belonging?’

Photo-credits: Chun Yao Lin and Alëna Vinokurova

Gerardo Gomez Tonda

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