Presentation short abstract

How do direct democratic practices shape our local communities when taking all living species into account? We will speak to the challenges and possibilities that such practices entail as a collective of artivist-researchers, through collective registering, documenting and analyzing compost actions.

Presentation long abstract

We participate as artivists in self-organised/governed groups in Buenos Aires. We take care of obtaining the barrelsfor composting through donations, we clean them, drill holes for drainage, manually cut and place a wooden lid, decorate them and inaugurate the compost bin in a neighbourhood spot, cared for by a volunteer neighbour. Over 24 months, we have inaugurated 10 composting bins, and harvested very many times. We find this an iterative process: it repeats itself over and over, and yet it is different each time. We collectively document our actions as art-practitioners of research and a constant learning process is at play. Our process shows that: 1) we preserve the collective memory of the territories we inhabit, since each neighbor group that gets started, follows the thread of another existing group, and yet recreates its way; 2) from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, ideas, knowledge, things and animals (human and more than human) continue to be regenerated, and taken care of; 3) collective composting activities become opportunities to take back the streets, the sidewalks, the open small public spaces that belong to all by practices of care, and also pose questions and challenges to our taken-for-granted urban ways of living; 4) we exercise the possibility of carrying out practices of reproduction of life which, through art and culture, different than the capital-centric, exclusive and privatising proposal that proceeds by fencing off and closing territories. In doing this work, we have created an ethnographically based, theoretically grounded composting-research perspective.