the whole heap · choose where to wander
Search doesn't retrieve a list, it carries you into the field, lighting the traces that resonate.
Five questions this artwork asks
Art, Science & Story for Tracing Decay and Renewal
the compost heap
How do we become differently human when we remember we become humus?
Here we trace the decay and renewal moving through everything — things breaking down, becoming-with something else — and practice sensing our own lives as that same motion.
What is composting within and around you right now?
Answer with a tracea small offering you leave in the Heap — a photograph, a recording, a few words, a field note. Not filed away, but left in the open, composting, keeping the traces around it alive. — a few words, a recording, a photograph, whatever you are sensing of the living world.
This Heap composts. Not on a schedule, because compost doesn’t keep one. A trace ages here, loses its picture or its sound, thins down to a line of text, and eventually goes to ground. Each becomes the medium the next ones growing in. Nothing here is ‘waste.’ It is just further-ing along.
And a screen can hold words, but it cannot hold breath.
Think of leaving a trace here as a beginning rather than a destination — a way toward each other, and out into shared air, where our gatherings happen in body and breath. The Heap is where grief starts composting. A room with other people in it is where it keeps going.
And grief isn’t the only thing composting here. We’re composting our language, too. Many Indigenous languages have always spoken of the living world in verbs, as kin in motion rather than objects at rest. English does the opposite. It turns almost everything into nouns: a body, the environment, my death. The physicist David Bohm also saw where that leads. A language built on nouns fragments our thought, dividing existence into separate things that seem fixed and static. Here we follow that older wisdom, and Bohm’s, practicing a language in harmony with “the unbroken flowing movement of existence as a whole” (Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980, p. 13). Soil isn’t a thing just sitting there; it’s something happening. So are we.
The purpose of this site is to make space for how we grieve and celebrate: for shared living, shared dying, and the ground that has been holding both all along.
hover or tab to a trace, what it wakes nearby lights up, and the tags show why. select it for the full resonance.
wakes up
