AC Discussion | Small Energies

Recently, Amplify worked with MdW Atlas as guest editors on a series of posts running throughout the month of April. Artists and organizers Lydia Cheshewalla, Patrick Costello, and Alajia McKizia, all of whom have connections to Omaha, and the Midwest more broadly, through land, lineage, and kinships, contributed to the series. As a point of departure, we asked them to consider composting as a framework for transformation, renewal, and exchange and referenced Carolyn Goldsmith's Compost, A Cosmic View with Practical Suggestions, a now out of print volume published in 1973 that includes tips for composters, gestural drawings, and prompts that lend the text a lyrical quality, which follow: "Breaking down / is / Building up""Digesting is transforming""Plants emerge as a natural consequence of / all that is happening / inside the soil body.”"You / Can Stir the Great Mix"“Small energies / Acting on each other / Reacting to each other”Goldsmith's book anchors composting, in an expanded context, as a practical and theoretical tool for breaking down certain histories, or things we’ve inherited, to situate and carry forward ways of knowing rooted in relationship, understanding, and empathy. The three artists who made work in response share affinities across geography and discipline in their approaches to multi-species care and embracing ecological entanglements in their work, practices that hold particularly resonance in this moment when changes in the political sphere stand to affect how we move toward realizing a more ecologically just and balanced future. We sat down with them not too long ago to talk more about their contributions, and the small energies that continue to move us forward.

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