Guest Composter: The Art of Decay

Today’s guest composter is Cassandra Marketos, a Los Angeles-based compost artist, writer, and community volunteer. She spends much of her time at Edendale Grove, a community garden and compost hub in Echo Park. Otherwise, she’s created a number of art projects and books about and around (and in) compost. She also publishes composting newsletter The Rot, which you should really be reading instead of this one. If you’d like to submit to the compost interview experience, by all means drop me a line.

What's in your compost(s) right now?
I have so many composts in so many places that it's truly hard to say. The compost I run at the community garden is packed with like 2,000 pounds of broccoli right now, plus yard waste and wood shavings from a local carpenter. My personal compost is mostly made of coffee grounds. (I'm an addict.) Another compost I run has an all-cotton American flag in it as part of a work that an artist is making for the upcoming Frieze art fair.

How long have you been composting?
I composted with my Mom as a kid growing up, but did not know anything about the process. I got back into it about five years ago when I moved to Los Angeles and had access to a yard for the first time in years. (I had been in New York, Washington DC, and a few major cities in Europe for the previous decade plus.)

What made you start composting?
When COVID hit, I lost every job I had lined up and had no idea what to do with myself. I started a compost pile in my front yard and offered to compost food scraps for my neighbors. I have no idea what compelled me to do this, exactly. It just seemed like a nice thing and a way to be outside, and it really took off from there.

How did you get involved with Edendale Grove? Can you talk about your work there?
I had to move halfway through COVID and ended up at a house in Angeleno Heights, a few blocks from Edendale Grove. There was a volunteer who wanted to get the compost program there going again, and a mutual connected us. The connection turned into a full-blown love affair with the garden. I started going multiple times a week. Initially, it was often just the two of us turning and making the compost. But over time, the crew began to grow.

The work we do there is more symbolic/educational than anything else. We teach classes (kids and adults, both!), have community work days, plant food, care for trees, and in general try to spread the gospel and joy of compost and taking care of the land. The volunteers have dubbed themselves "The Rot Squad." One day we will make T-shirts.

You describe yourself as a “compost artist” and have done collaborative art/installations in that vein. How does that work, creatively speaking?
Haha, I wish I knew.

A couple of years ago, I met the artist David Horvitz at a mutual friend's art opening. At the time, I was still just volunteering religiously at the community compost hub in my neighborhood. About halfway through our initial convo, David decided I was an artist and just started treating me as such. He completely opened the door for me. He let me come to his garden, make compost there, and invited me into different art shows with him at different museums around Los Angeles. I made a compost pile with him at Vielmetter Gallery, and I composted fragments of the Berlin Wall at the Wende Museum. I still have pieces of the Wall in a jar in my house, actually.

Just like that first simple pile in my front yard, the composting stuff has kept getting bigger. People are curious about compost. Decomposition is a fascinating and profound metaphor. I get a lot of phone calls from people who are interested in thinking about compost in an “artistic” way, and it's super fun to be open to those collaborations and explore them. My goal is always, in the end, to teach people something or spark something open in them in how they consider themselves in relation to the environment.

Right now, I am working on a show for a gallery in Eagle Rock—I plan to mound up a huuuuuugee pile of fresh compost in the center of the room as part of it. I will also be participating in PST, an art/science fair put on by the Getty.

When discussing what's more safe or less safe to compost due to industrial or environmental contamination, you mentioned the idea that we live in a “post-contaminant world.” What does that mean?
Everything is contaminated, ha. Not even our rainwater is safe anymore. There is simply no way to protect your compost pile from this reality. Sure, you can avoid cardboard—but the vegetables we grow are full of microplastics, anyway. So the lines we try to draw are always going to be a little arbitrary. We can do our best and try to avoid putting overt plastics and chemicals into our piles, definitely. But I think we should also face, head on, the limits of our control. This is a very good lesson, even if it reflects a very sad reality.

But I also want to note that by being honest with ourselves about the current state of contamination, I do not mean we should just accept it and do nothing. We MUST do something. But being rigidly righteous about the ingredients of our compost is probably not the most productive action. Helping elect local officials who have a say over important stuff like renewable energy permits, waste management protocols, agricultural policy, etc., are examples of important and productive action. I follow the organization Climate Cabinet almost religiously in service of these efforts. I'm also very involved with my super local representatives.

Tell me about your upcoming book Compost After Reading.
I teach a lot of compost workshops and classes, and at some point I just recognized it's a lot of information to try and absorb—and that people would really benefit from some kind of take-home material to reference later, if they wanted to start up their own piles. I thought it would be fun to give them a resource they could compost, since my whole philosophy is to teach people to teach themselves, and to learn by doing, versus being super precise or prescriptive. So I sat down and wrote out a little guide of the basics and called it Compost This Book. I designed and self-published the first edition with my friend, Larry. Shortly after, the good folks at Apogee Graphics asked to have me in for a meeting, and proposed they would design and publish a proper edition. They did an amazing job. I also got a “real” book deal out of it, and an expanded/revised edition called Compost After Reading will be out from Timbre Books early next year. :D

What do you personally compost the most?
Coffee grounds, haha. By a mile. I believe this is also the reason the stainless steel open bowl that I use to keep my food scraps in my kitchen never attracts insects.

What gives you the most satisfaction to compost, personally and/or in your community work?
Tough call, honestly. I had an absolute love affair with the cool, passive compost pile I had at my old house. It was such a wonderful and nurturing experience to watch it grow and change and warm up and cool down and support the ebbing-and-flowing of different life forms, like beetles and worms and even, on occasion, a little salamander or frog. But almost nothing in my life compares to showing up once a week to the community compost and working alongside neighbors and friends. It's just such a spot of joy in a sea of endless chaos. I think it's really important on an emotional/spiritual level to have things in our lives that put us in touch with other people, to provide some service or act of care. Even just one hour a week is such an inoculant against doom and anxiety.

What happens to the compost from the compost hub once it's done composting?
It goes back to the community for free. People come by and take it in buckets. We use it to fertilize the trees and vegetables in the garden. Sometimes I use it for art projects.

Anything weird or unusual you've attempted to compost, or seen brought in from the community?
Yeah, an American flag! Haha. Don't tell our current Administration. ;)

How do you explain the appeal of composting to those outside the faith?
It varies, but I think ... freedom? Compost is meant to be gross and dirty and unspecific. I think that's really cathartic for people, who are generally accustomed—in our modern world—to things needing to be neat, tidy, and ordered. We are all under so much pressure, all the time, from ourselves and others, to be “perfect” and to have it all and get it all done ... compost is this one thing that's a permission slip just to be messy. A thing I often do with my students is invite them to jump right into the compost and start stomping on stuff to break it up a little. From little kids to the most professionalized adults, this invitation is always electric. People are first reluctant, then reluctant to show how excited they are, and then just fully excited.

I also will draw a target on the cement wall of the garden and ask people to whup moldy melons at it. This breaks the melons up so they can be added to the compost, but it's also fun and helps people let off a lot of steam. I think the physical nature of the work is really addictive for folks who don't always have a lot of other healthy outlets.

What's the most memorable or striking reaction from kids when you've shown them how composting works?
Kids always get it right away. It's the adults that are tough. Kids intuitively understand the link between life and death, decay and creation. They love it. Adults are the ones who struggle. They have all these hangups about rotting food, "gross" stuff, trash, and dirt. Kids will literally start eating the food scraps if they think they still look "good enough." Kids are amazing.

_{All images courtesy Cassandra Marketos.}