SPRING/SUMMER 2025
COMPOSTING IS SO HOT.* CREATING CULTURAL, BIOLOGICAL & LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY

The course combines different forms of learning. While there is a strong focus on (collective) practice, we will also read and exchange together and thus create an interplay between practice and theory.

Practice
One one hand, we will continue our compost care as both an ecological and metaphorical practice during the summer semester. The compost care sessions will take place approximately every two weeks on Friday afternoons from 3–5 pm at the compost heap in the garden of the main building of the Angewandte, and will include a gardening practice as well as exercises and workshops such as writing, movement practice, braiding nettles, fermentation, working with clay, …

Theory
On the other hand, we want to consider how we can use these composting methods to create cultural, biological and linguistic diversity.
The focus will be on the possibilities of entering into relationships with plants and the more-than-human world in general. With James Bridle (“Ways of Being. Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence”) we want to rediscover the diversity of intelligent forms of existence and think ecology and technology together. In our compost reader, texts on composting (as thinking-sensing-making) as well as diversity (in and outside of institutions) and anti-capitalist commoning will be equally important.

Exercises
In the exercises part, we will cooperate with associations that i.e. support young people in less privileged settings, or are active in social integration practices. We will translate content, techniques and methods of our artistic practices into widely accessible workshops, carrying out these workshops and find ways to open up our institutions (Klasse für Alle, Angewandte, the artistic field in general) to underrepresented groups.

*Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016

-Attendance and participation on Thursday meeting
-Attendance at the compost care practice: as often as possible
-Exercise: Conception and implementation of a workshop with a cooperating association (if possible, the workshop should take place during the Angewandte Festival)
-Examination:
written: workshop concept + short written feedback
oral: feedback discussion on the workshop + reflection on the texts read

A reading list will be announced at the beginning of the semester.

Dates will be updated until end of February; details of the compost care sessions can also be found on the Klasse für Alle website and Instagram:

www.klassefueralle.uni-ak.ac.at

@klassefueralle

@compostcollective–kfa