compostations

Compostations was a collaborative lecture and event programme by MARD, MARCH, the Climate Forum & the Forest School as part of the Unit 2 collaborative unit between MA Regenerative Design & M Arch. Compostations was a student-led collaboration for adding layers, fermentation, dialogue, experimental modes of practice and provocation; with guests also invited to add to the dialogue.  

Students were in cross-course groups and collaborated each week through responding to learnings from their respective unit sessions. M ARCH collaborated with Ana Maria Gutierrez from Organizmo in Colombia and MA Regenerative Design with Bas Kools, from Geoship, in USA.  

Compostations is a collective process and sessions will lead to a series of provocations through either/or audio, podcast, film, interviews, actions, that are generated through deep collaboration in the cross-course groups.  

Compostations provocations are raw in nature, emerging from weekly layers of knowledge, experience, and dialogue. Composting happens in the activity of doing and making together and coming to new positions and perspectives. Compostation is a place to process, unearth our vocabulary, and develop new language that invites us to reconsider what it means to become place. Can our assumptions decay, make space for new synergies and give soil for new understandings? 

See below for programme. 

07.02.23

Participatory Construction Processes 

Ana Maria Gutierrez joined by Pedro Jajoy from the Inga AWAI indigenous community, Colombia. This lecture will explore methodologies of co- design and co-creation. It will illustrate LA MINGA as an ancestral community dynamic and the manifestation of a vivid community architectures. Watch Here

08.02.23

Compost and Collaboration 

Hari of Compost Mentis will introduce students to the art of community composting, through both practical, theoretical, playful and speculative lenses. We’ll learn together about the multitude of organisms that are part of the soil, including humans who have a role to play in collaborating to transform our waste materials, attend to soil health, and imagine better systems for living, caring and being on this planet.

09.02.23

Living Systems Communities 

Andy Goldring is a long term activist with permaculture in Britain and has been the Development Co-ordinator of the Permaculture Association (Britain) for several years. He is the Chief Executive of the Permaculture Association, and educator, activist and permaculture trainer and contributed significantly to the development of the Permaculture Association. 

08.02.23

Samai Kutij (A Breath of Wind) 

An exclusive film screening of Samai Kutij (A Breath of Wind ~ 2020), directed Pedro Luis Jajoy Juajibioy from the Inga AWAI, Colombia and produced by Cabildo Inga de Colón , Fundacion Alpasamay (co-producer). The film screening will be followed by a Q&A session with the film director Pedro Luis Jajoy Juajibioy. 

13.02.23

Listening to the Land 

Laura Burns (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist making work around reparative social-ecological practices. Listening to land and its relations guides her ongoing conversation with more-than-human and human ancestors. Watch Here

14.02.23

Sacred Geometry 

This lecture will explore sacred expressions in architecture and interpretations of nature in these creation processes. Jaime Peña is part of Arquitectura Mixta are a community formed by a multidisciplinary group that focuses on bio architecture and the use of natural materials for the creation of habitats in universal harmony. Watch Here

09.02.23

Living Systems Communities 

The Design Justice Network is a home for people committed to embodying and practicing the design justice principles. They wield their collective power and experiences to bring forth worlds that are safer, more just, more accessible, and more sustainable. They critically question the role of design and designers. Rooted in a sense of abundance, possibility, and joy, they provide community for design justice practitioners. 

21.02.23

Technologies and Ancestral Knowledges 

Barbara Santos is co-founder of Cuenco de Cera and is a quiasma.co. Interdiciplinary researcher interested in co-creation, environmental protection, conservation of knowledges, augmented realities and sacred cartographies. 

22.02.23

Earth Memory as Method 

This lecture focuses on the concept ‘earth memory as method’ in the reconstruction of entangled forms of violence - environmental, political, economic, to name a few. Hannah will walk through the practice-based research of her PhD around the aerial fumigation of coca with herbicides in Colombia, to how these methods developed into a three year collaboration with the Colombian Truth Commission and Forensic Architecture. 

22.02.23

Making Things Social 

Curator Lucia Pietroiusti works at the intersection of art, ecology and systems. She is the founder of General Ecology at Serpentine, London, and the curator of Sun & Sea (Lithuanian Pavilion, 2019 Venice Biennale), 8th Biennale Gherdeïna and The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish (both with Filipa Ramos). 

08.03.23

Homegrown: Building a Post-carbon Future 

Material Cultures’ work investigates how material and industrial cultures shape the world and challenges the regulations, supply chains and processes that to a large extent prescribe how the buildings we inhabit are made, function and feel. Modern methods of construction have the capacity to transform the way in which things are built and offer the space to generate new forms of culture in the construction industry.