Come compost with us! 

locations
compost garden in the courtyard of the University of Applied Arts (Oskar-Kokoschka-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna)
studio of Klasse für Alle Heiligenkreuzerhof, Schönlaterngasse 5, 1010 Vienna
Hügelgarten (Feldversuche) of Kleine Stadtfarm, Naufahrtweg 14a, 1220 Wien

ABOUT

Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. We must return the gift. (Robin Wall Kimmerer in “Braiding Sweetgrass. Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants”)

In the spring, we return to the compost heap and its garden to follow Robin Wall Kimmerer’s call to continuously renew our connection with the (natural) world. Composting is joining ecological cycles – we practise to treat our organic matter carefully, to appreciate what is nourishing, and to recognize the interrelatedness of decay, transformation, and growth. We renew our focus on an everyday base. Composting is a bodily practice that relates us to the world. Composting is maintenance – developing a sense for ongoingness that demands attention, presence, celebration and being in place. Composting, we notice what is there, what’s becoming, in a relation of reciprocity. Maintaining compost is maintaining relationships: composting is learning-from and learning-with: humans, soils, gardens, the more-than human world.. 
Composting as a form of care taking is embedded in political, spiritual, bodily and environmental actions. To care for compost is to oppose the capitalist world order that is built on colonialism, imperialism, racism, oppression, ecocide and genocide. Composting as learning-with and caring-for is getting in touch but also more: it is getting into action. Composting is (ecological) resistance, regeneration and repair. (A.L.)

*compost collective is an open collective. Whoever wants to actively participate in compost days and compost care is invited to join! Members of the collective take responsibility for the organic compost garden at Oskar-Kokoscha-Platz throughout the semester. They also take over the roles of hosting and/or facilitating compost days and skills exchange sessions. If you are interested to join, come to compost days or contact us!

At Klasse für Alle, we compost since 2022. compost collective was founded in the frame of composting at Klimabiennale 2024 by then core members Vik Bayer, Camille Belmin, Yeonwoo Chang, Kai Feldhammer, Vickie Ferreri, Nola Haag, Ivie Isibor, Andrea Lumplecker and Michael Reindel. Together, they have not only developed strategies to integrate composting into everyday life but also practice artistic methods in relation to composting such as deep listening, writing, moving, reading, fermenting, braiding and many more.

This semester’s program – COMPOST DAYS – is curated and organised by the team of Klasse für Alle: Vik Bayer, Ivie Isibor, Raphaela Leitner, Andrea Lumplecker, oleksa shevchenko, Ritger Traag.

compost day #7
SPRING GARDENING
date Friday April 17, 2026
time 2 – 5pm
location Compost heap, garden of Oskar Kokoschka Platz 2, 1010 Vienna
with Sigrid Gerl

compost day #8
CULTIVATING OTHERWISEFILM SCREENING
date Friday, May 22, 2026
time 2pm–7pm
location compost garden + studio of Klasse für Alle at Heiligenkreuzerhof, Schönlaterngasse 5, 1010
curated by/with Ipek Hamzaoğlu

The Secret Garden, 2023 © Nour Ouayda

Long understood as a condensed image of society, the garden has served as a testing ground for how societies imagine their relationship to land, labor, and life itself, a place where ideas of care, control, belonging, and coexistence are negotiated on an intimate scale. More than a site of leisure or beauty, the garden reveals how relationships between humans and the earth are shaped, organized, and contested. Once imagined as an enclosed paradise or a symbol of harmony, it later became a marker of power, ownership, and political order. In the present moment of ecological urgency, the garden re-emerges as a space that calls for critical attention rather than nostalgia.

The films in this program approach gardening as a situated and embodied practice rather than a romantic ideal. Gardens appear as spaces of survival, adaptation, and reconfiguration, where postcolonial and queer communities cultivate not only plants but alternative ways of living together. Attentive to soil, bodies, and inherited knowledge, these works resist extractive rhythms through slowness, repetition, and care. The garden is understood not as a finished form, but as an ongoing process, a site where care and struggle intersect, memory is tended, and new social imaginaries take root, fragile, provisional, yet insistently alive.

We will watch the following films:

Ma: Space/Time in the Garden of Ryoan-Ji (1989) by Takahiko Iimura and Arata Isozaki
Cruising (2024) by Nadir Sönmez
The Secret Garden: A Tale in Eight Chapters (2023) by Nour Ouayda

and together read excerpts from:
Pharmacopoeia (2022) by Derek Jarman 
and 
On the Necessity of Gardening: An ABC of Art Botany and Cultivation (2021), ed. by Laurie Cluitmans

ARCHIVE

We will spend this spring day in, around and between the area of Kleine Stadtfarm and the Danube, to experience the awakening and becoming-new  with nature, with water and soil.

We will start the day with a morning canoe ride at the Danube, guided by Nikolaus. Sigrid will later lead us for a walk around the farm, to look at and listen deeply to plants, to gather herbs for our lunch, to learn from the diverse (plant) communities at Kleine Stadtfarm, and from one another. A seed exchange session and common lunch will conclude the day.

There are limited places for the canoe ride, please sign up! You can also join us at Kleine Stadtfarm from noon!

compost day #6
SPRING COMPOSTING
date Friday, March 27, 2026
time 11am–5pm
location compost garden in the courtyard of the University of Applied Arts (Oskar-Kokoschka-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna)
with Sigrid Gerl & Cultural Hybrid Collective

© Andrea Elaiza, Cultural Hybrid Collective
compost care #11, March 2025 @Andrea Lumplecker

compost day #5
SOLSTICE, BELOW THE SURFACE

date Friday, December 19, 2025
time 2–7 pm (celebratory dinner from 5 pm)
location compost garden, Oskar Kokoschka Platz 2 + studio of Klasse für Alle at Heiligenkreuzerhof, Schönlaterngasse 5, 1010
with Ivie Isibor & Sedjro Mensah
practicalities Bring your compost! Wear warm clothes!

©Andrea Lumplecker

Through the pretext of the solstice — a cosmological threshold often linked to dread and darkness in European imagination — this workshop explored what it means to become invisible. Not an absence, but a shift: a descent into other modes of existence, perception, and relation. We looked at how Western thought tends to fear the unseen — equating invisibility with loss, obscurity, or death — while in many African cosmologies, particularly within animist traditions, becoming invisible signals transition, permeability, and the continuation of life through different forms.

This session unfolded as a serendipitous journey: from the history of abstraction and its separation from the world of matter, to the tulip mania and its echoes of speculation and fragility; from soil practices in Burkina Faso to a sacred mountain of waste, and to the grave of Sedjro’s grandmother in Benin. Each stop opened a different relationship to what lies below — compost, memory, spirit and guilt. Together we drew stories as a living mind map, moving between art history, ecology, and ancestral knowledge. The aim was not to define the invisible, but to sense how it circulates through materials, gestures, and cosmologies — to think with the soil, rather than about it.

compost day #4
TERRA PRETA

date Friday, December 5, 2025
time 2pm–7 pm
location Kleine Stadtfarm, Naufahrtweg 14a, 1220 Wien
with Nikolaus Eckhard, Vik Bayer, Andrea Lumplecker
practicalities Please wear warm clothing and shoes! We will spend most of the afternoon doing practical work outdoors. There will be tea made with herbs from the garden and a warm meal for everyone, as well as a wood-heated indoor space for discussions and warming up.
registration via klasseuferalle@uni-ak.ac.at or Instagram: @klassefueralle

©Andrea Lumplecker

Invited by Nikolaus Eckhard, we spent Compost Day #4 at the Hügelbeet of the Feldversuche Initiative at Kleine Stadtfarm and made Terra Preta together. In addition to practical work in the garden and with fire, we talked about topics such as soil fertility, CO2, and the origins of Terra Preta as an indigenous practice in the Amazon region. We also shared thoughts on our relationship with fire (or even the “Pyrocene”), the night, the garden and its creatures, and how we want to live together. Nikolaus guided us through the day, with his background as an artist working in and with the garden, together with Vik Bayer and Andrea Lumplecker from Klasse für Alle.

Nikolaus Eckhard is an artist based in Vienna who focuses on collaborative sculpture and performance as well as film. In his artistic research practice, he explores the transfer of information between materials and bodies in order to examine the traces our lives leave behind in stones. He was co-director of the artistic research projects Greenwashed Concrete (2020–2022) and Reverse Imagining Vienna (2021–2024) at the University of Applied Arts. He is also co-founder of the initiative Feldversuche, which since 2021 has offered local and international artists the opportunity to explore the themes of food production and urbanization in a communal courtyard in Vienna.


compost day #3
DIGESTING FEMINISM – SENSORY READING & FERMENTATION

date Friday, November 21, 2025
time 2–7 pm
location compost garden + studio of Klasse für Alle at Heiligenkreuzerhof, Schönlaterngasse 5, 1010
with Monja Simon, Camille Belmin

©Andrea Lumplecker

How do we nourish ourselves?
Have you ever thought about the life of your digestion?
How can we digest feminism collectively?

Digesting Feminism is a collective practice of listening, tasting, and composting, where feminist theories ferment not in books, but in bodies. Our guts, like our minds, are shaped by what we consume and how we process it. Drawing from Monja Simon’s publication Sauerkraut and her lived fermentation practice, participants were invited to taste home-fermented foods, share stories, and explore what it means to digest feminism physically, emotionally, and intellectually. This invitation to slow down, sense inward, taste and reflect made space for collective transformation and porous knowledge-making. Inspired by Elizabeth A. Wilson’s Gut Feminism we began from the belly — as archive, filter, and compass. We considered digestion as a method: to hold what resists, to compost what sits heavy, to sit with what cannot be rushed. Digesting Feminism is a tender practice for anyone drawn to food, feminism, fermentation, composting and feeling.

compost day #2
PROCESSES OF RAGE

date Friday, November 7, 2025
time 2pm–6 pm
meeting point compost garden in the courtyard of the University of Applied Arts (Oskar-Kokoschka-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna)
location Brigittenauer Bucht, 20 min. from U1 Donauinsel (we will provide coordinates via Instagram Friday afternoon)
with Frida Robles

©Andrea Lumplecker

This workshop invited participants to explore the idea of rightful rage (digna rabia), a concept articulated by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in their fight against the oppressive and discriminatory structures of the Mexican state. On January 1, 1994, the Zapatistas rose in rebellion and issued the First Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle, calling for communal ways of living, freedom, and basic rights such as health and education.

The rightful rage is the claim for the anger, frustration and fury that is constructive and that searches to dismantle centuries of colonial and neo-colonial violence against Indigenous peoples in the Americas. It also extends to resisting all forms of authoritarianism, systemic inequality, and cultural erasure. During this workshop, we read some of the writings of the EZLN together and took part in simple practices that engage with embodied anger and written expressions of fury. In a time marked by silence, censorship, and repression, many of us carry anger in our bodies and hearts. The workshop became a small space to share that feeling and reflect on it.

For the shared meal, we made a fire to cook skewers with vegetables with a bit of chili; together with a shot of mezcal and sliced oranges. We burnt some texts of the workshop in the open fire.

compost day #1 
COMPOSTING AS A VARIETY OF TECHNIQUES

date Friday, October 10, 2025
time 2–7 pm 
location compost garden in the courtyard of the University of Applied Arts (Oskar-Kokoschka-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna)
with Kai Feldhammer & Anna Zett and Klasse für Performative Künste Leipzig & Cordula Fötsch (Gartenpolylog)

@Klasse für alle

On our first official Compost Day of the semester, we explored composting using a variety of techniques. Kai Feldhammer opened the day with a guided movement session that will connect participants to compost in a physical and spatial way. Anna Zett invited us to a group analytical improvisation session at the compost heap. Together with the Performative Arts class at the HGB Leipzig, which she was temporarily teaching, she was visiting Vienna this week and was a guest at the Angewandte. Like any large group of people, the compost heap is a jumble of different life forms, bodies, and energies. What images arise between us when we gather around a compost heap instead of a campfire? Together with the students from Leipzig, Anna Zett opened up an associative space in which processes of connecting and separating take place, becoming conscious in the group, only to dive back into the darkness of the compost again and again.
Afterwards, we had a close look at our compost, together with Cordula Fötsch from Gartenpolylog to see what it needed and took care of it: we dug, turned and nourished the compost heap. Cordula guided us through this work and shared her knowledge on composting with us.

compost day #0
MAINTAINANCE, REPAIR, CARE

date Friday, October 31, 2025
time 2 pm–6 pm (without collective dinner, but some garden snacks)
location compost garden in the courtyard of the University of Applied Arts (Oskar-Kokoschka-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna)
with compost collective & Sigrid Gerl

©Andrea Lumplecker

We began our return to the semester with a practical work session. As always, when working with Sigrid, this means getting in touch with the compost and the garden, to see what they need after the summer and at the beginning of fall. We observed, touched and felt what the garden needed (as well as what we needed). We also gave the compost fence stability: repaired bamboo, added wood – carved, cut, heated up and bent. We nourished and we were nourished, we organised and repaired, while we carried moments and garden stories from the summer into the fall (and our new semester).

COMPOST CARE #17 & Angewandte Festival
MAPPING COMPOST
Friday June 27, 2025, 4–6 pm
with Sigrid Gerl, meandr
location compost heap/garden, yard of of Angewandte, OKP

TRANS*MUTATION LAB #1 BREWING
AN EXPLORATION IN COLLECTIVE MAKING, GROWING AND CORRESPONDING
Saturday May 3rd
hosted by Momo
location shared upon registration
registration at hontebeyrie.e@gmail.com

We began by brewing kombucha, getting to know each other, the space, and the bodies that move through it—and are moved by it.
Letting time and narratives unfold, ferment, and correspond. 
A collaboration of many agents, hosted by Momo.

THE CARRIER BAG THEORY OF ANTI FICTION 3: NETTLES
Part 1: NETTLE GATHERING EXCURSION
Friday 23. May, meeting point 15h
hosted by Anna
location: Hill Garden at Kleine Stadtfarm
registration: DM to @anna.tanzt

©oleksa shevchenko

THE CARRIER BAG THEORY OF ANTI FICTION
COLLECTIVE WEAVING & READING AFTERNOON
Friday May 2nd, 3–6pm 
hosted by Anna
location Studio of Klasse für Alle at Heiligenkreuzerhof
registration through insta DM to @anna.tanzt

©oleksa shevchenko

THE CARRIER BAG THEORY OF ANTI FICTION
COLLECTIVE WEAVING & READING AFTERNOON
Friday April 11, 3–6pm 
hosted by Anna
location Studio of Klasse für Alle at Heiligenkreuzerhof
registration at insta DM to @anna.tanzt

©oleksa shevchenko

We compost & garden collectively, together with other humans and lots of more than human beings who need dedicated care. Compost needs (different & many) ingredients to grow, plants need water regularly …
At the core of this meeting are the questions:
How to organize that growth & care collectively?
How to commit to a long term project? What do I want to learn, what do I want to give? Where is my responsibility?
We will bring our composts to the heap, start with check in & a sensing practice, look out for and water plants, and discuss “collective action”.

On March 7. we met outside in the compost garden for the first time this spring/summer semester, to slowly GET IN TOUCH. We walked around the garden to see how the trees we’ve replanted, the mosses, nettles and other plants we’ve taken care of last year, were doing.
We did some exercises for getting to know and getting in touch with our compost garden in practical and sensual ways, to not only see, but also sense those more than human beings in many different ways – listening, touching, smelling, tasting, … We composted dry plants to make space and light for little, growing plants. We even already seeded some spinach, rucola and salad.
We are very much looking forward to working with and in this garden in a practice of compost and soil care, this year.

The photo shows a Woven textile from the collection of Elvira Espejo Ayca (in: Afterall, Issue 55/56)
©Vik Bayer (1+3), Bio Design Lab / Living Library (2)

COMPOST CARE #6
Friday 20.12.24, 3–5 pm
end of the year compost care + burning herbs
hosted by Ivie Isibor (compost collective)
meeting point Compost Heap at Oskar-Kokoschka-Platz, Courtyard of Die Angewandte Main Building

COMPOST CARE #5
Friday 29.11.2024, 3 pm
compost visit at Kleine Stadtfarm
invited by Sigrid Gerl
meeting point Kleine Stadt Farm
Naufahrtweg 14a
1220 Wien
public transport: U2 to Donaustadtbrücke, 93A to Rallenweg


COMPOST CARE #4
Friday 22.11.2024, 3–5 pm
Spinning Nettles
hosted by Vickie Ferreri (compost collective) & Pi Schuh #4
Friday 22.11.2024, 3–5 pm
SPINNING NETTLES
hosted by Vickie Ferreri (compost collective) & Pi Schuh

photos ©Vickie Ferreri

Nettle plants grow all around our compost heap – we love their resilience as well as their beauty. In this workshop, Vickie and Pi will show us how to cut up the dried fibers and spin them into strong twine.

COMPOST CARE #3
Friday 15.11.2024, 3–5 pm
Braiding Bamboo, compost care
hosted by compost collective