hannah stippl

Compostist Painting 

Acrylics and spray paint on canvas, 100 x 120 cm, 2022

“We relate, know, think, world, and tell stories through and with other stories, worlds, knowledges, thinkings, yearnings. (...) Critters are at stake in each other in every mixing and turning of the terran compost pile. We are compost, not posthuman; we inhabit the humusities, not the humanities.” — Donna J. Haraway

‘Compostist Painting’, a term borrowed from Donna J. Haraway, plays with the ambivalence of the concepts of compost / composition. Painterly colour surfaces, vegetal patterns and text passages combine to form a contemplation of the human relationship to the earth and the attempt to realign it.

At the beginning there is a doubly effective curse that defines the earth as inferior and places man in an inescapably divided relationship with it. Although humans are masters and owners of the earth, they cannot escape its materiality. The relationship is poisoned, destroyed, transformed into a relationship of exploitation. The earth has become hostile, man is no longer at home in it and has lost the ground beneath his feet. It is the most primal of all offences: Not being able to be part of the earth. It is said that this disproportion is the basic condition of humanity.

But that is not true. There have always been alternative stories and many new narratives are possible. Other relationships to the earth, to dust and dirt, to compost and humus, to matter, to the stuff of life. To living matter: earth is a personal experience of intermingling, connection, decomposition and transformation. This is what Donna Haraway means when she describes herself as a compostist.

“Philosophically and materially, I am a compostist, not a posthumanist. Critters—human and not—become-with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary developmental earthly worlding and unworlding.” — Donna J. Haraway