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 particular 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.
Click below to listen to a recording of the full conversation or keep scrolling to read the transcript.
Special thanks to MdW Atlas, Lumpen Radio, and Public Media Institute for their support in making this series possible.
Top (from left to right): Patrick Costello, Peter Fankhauser
Bottom (from left to right): Lydia Cheshewalla, Alajia McKizia
Title of Discussion: Small Energies
Speaker 1: Lydia Cheshewalla
Speaker 2: Patrick Costello
Speaker 3: Alajia McKizia
Moderator: Peter Fankhauser
Date of Discussion: March 14th, 2025
List of Acronyms: [LC] = Lydia Cheshewalla; [PC] = Patrick Costello; [AM] = Alajia McKizia; [PF] = Peter Fankhauser
Transcript
[PC] Hello. Patrick Costello. I am an artist living and working in New York City, the unceded territory of the Lenape people. My practice explores the impacts of history on present ecologies, and I focus a lot on the gardens as sites of care and control Video.
[LC] My name is Lydia Cheshewalla and I'm an Osage artist living and working in motion across the Great Plains ecoregion. My practice spans a lot of things, a lot of ecological care, systems of care, community care. I make ephemeral installations with kin that I've gathered and create these formations on a wall in collaboration with them that are really maps of location—who I'm surrounded by, who they are or where they come from, and how we take care of each other. And an important part of my practice is that at the end of these installations, where I've drawn in these beyond human kin, they get to go home. Everything has its agency, its own story, and its right to return. And so, there's an actual composting of the physical things that I'm making back into the environment.
[AM] Hi, my name is Alajia McKizia. I'm a multidisciplinary artist, organizer, and curator. I also develop content for exhibits at the Luminarium in Omaha. My practice started off with making mixed media works and performance, and now there's a little bit more arts administration for a festival I run called Juneteenth Joyfest. It’s a Black arts and cultural festival every year in North Omaha. I also love creative placemaking and I have a history working in urban agriculture.
[PF] Well, thank you all for being here today. Just for a little bit of discussion context, we're going to be talking more about your individual contributions for the MdW Atlas, which consider composting as a framework for transformation, renewal and exchange. And just for reference and as a point of departure, you all looked at a not so well-known little book by Carolyn Goldsmith called, Compost, A Cosmic View with Practical Suggestions published in 1973. It includes tips for composters, drawings, and prompts as well.
We pulled a few of those prompts and offered them as a place to start thinking through for your individual contributions. And those are: “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,” and “small energies, acting on each other, reacting to each other.”
So, first, maybe a good place to start is asking how compost, or composting, shows up in your individual practices broadly speaking. And anybody's welcome to jump in.
[AM] I’ll start. Lately, it's not as frequent, but I worked at Big Garden, which is an urban and cultural nonprofit, for five years and did a lot of education work and co-directed the education department. We did a lot of fun experiments and things happening with compost where we were composting for garden beds and teaching kids or adults or whoever had a garden. We created games, like a compost relay race, and I have a lot of memories of teaching kids about how important composting is in fun and joyful ways that are easy to digest.
[PC] And I think a lot about compost as a gardener in New York City. I remember coming to this city in 2007 and starting to work with community gardeners here who were all like, “You know you're touching do you're touching zoo doo.” And I was like, “Wow.” And they were like, “Yeah, all the compost in this garden comes from the Bronx Zoo.” And that was the first time I thought about compost as a cyclical system involving poop and I was sort of like, “Oh, this, this is right. I want to do more of this,” because as a white person, as a cis man, as a person who is settler descended, who has all kinds of markers in my identity that represent oppressive or problematic or shameful histories, I was like, “This is a model for taking the poop and growing plants.”
Since then, I really feel like compost has been both like an actual physical material that I use in my work and as a gardener and an artist, but also a metaphorical symbol or framework that allows me to think about my work in relation to processing inheritance and what it looks like to transform things that maybe we don't love.
[LC] I think I'm coming at compost from rural sensibilities. I grew up in a rural part of Oklahoma. It's not quite a suburb of Tulsa. We're still spread pretty far apart and everybody had a compost. And they didn't have small compost; these were massive compost bins built out of wood that were like permanent fixtures in their yard. That was always fascinating to me. As a kid, it's like, what is this forbidden castle? I can't crawl inside because it's full of decomposing matter, which only makes it more fascinating.
I think, as I've gotten older, my focus and interest in rural sensibilities really turned to prairie maintenance. I grew up near the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Oklahoma, in the northeast corner of Oklahoma, and it's the largest remaining tract of tallgrass prairie in existence in the world. The reason why this ecosystem has been protected has to do with a combination of factors, the stone geology being a major part of it, because we're at the bottom of the Flint Hills, so it couldn't become agricultural land. It became grazing land.
Also, this land is managed through the application of fire. The Indigenous people of the whole Great Plains region, we're doing that. That's why we have a prairie through the middle of the country. And that's why the soil is so good, because that process of burning and renewal is an ecosystem system level of composting. And so, I got really interested in what that means. What is fire doing? Why are we burning? Why is it important that the practice remains unbroken between Indigenous people, to settlers, to present day? When it didn't happen that way in other states, like in Nebraska, that practice was broken and so there's this big movement to get fire back and to get people comfortable with fire again.
And I'm fascinated by the idea that this is how we compost a whole ecosystem and turn it over and all the different things that happen. We’re burning away biomass and so we're preventing fires from burning out of control. It's that charcoal, that ash, that helps purify water. So that's a composting of our water systems, a renewal of our water systems. The different insects that rely on the gaps in between certain things being there and other things not being there, that gap where everything's been burnt down is where they can come into existence because of that space.
I'm just interested in how these ecosystems are already doing these things, and how human involvement further facilitates that, because I think there's this notion that humans and nature are so separate, but we are part of this system. Even though I think technology has kind of elevated us out in certain ways, we're never out. We live on the planet, we require the air, we require gravity, we require this distance from the sun and this amount of shield. I'm fascinated by how these things work together and what the human hand in it is, or can be, and what happens without us, and how these systems turn over and renew and how cyclical nature is. So, I'm coming at it from big scale compost for the world, I guess.
[PF] I love your thinking about composting as a practical tool for renewal, but I also love hearing about your attachments to and memories of composting and the first times that you all encountered what composting means. I feel like that injects a lot of wonder and joy and humor into this conversation. So, thank you for sharing that.
Can you talk about the prompt, or prompts, from the text that helped shape the way you approached this specific project?
[PC] I was responding to two of the prompts. I'm really attracted to “you can stir the great mix.” And I also love “digesting is transforming.” I've been thinking a lot about digesting recently, because I've started to write about the work I've done with community gardeners in the city. Specifically, I worked for a long time at one building in Washington Heights that was mostly HIV positive seniors or older adults. I made very close friends there with these old queens. We would garden together, and I learned so much. It was the first time in my life that I had access to the stories and wisdom of queer elders. Gardening was the medium that bridged our experience. My experience of New York City and of queer community is so different from a person who was living here in the eighties and nineties, in particular. So, gardening became this amazing physical activity that allowed us to connect and allowed us to literally find common ground.
I had been writing a lot about those things and then was like, “I think I want to write for this thing.” Meanwhile, simultaneously, I am in the struggle of trying to figure out how to modernize my technology plan and go from a flip phone to a smartphone because I never did it, and I'm really attached to my flip phone. So, I was thinking about what my agency is in this. How am I stirring the great mix? I'm actively digesting this experience of working with these seniors. I'm also trying to transform and update my relationship to technology, and in all of that, I was like, “I don't have language for this. I am just in it, learning. I don't I don't actually know if there is a right way forward.” So, I went to my flip phone and went through all of the low-res images on and started like picking some of them out for this project and then went to the smartphone that I got that I call my picture phone, and I found some short videos on that on that and made them into gifs and was like, “Maybe this is a way that digesting is transforming or maybe I’m stirring the great mix.
[LC] I'm thinking about that flip phone. I think I'm going the opposite direction. I might be getting rid of my smartphone and going back to a flip phone. Too many ads. I want my freedom from advertisements.
But yeah, I was initially drawn to “small energies acting on each other, reacting to each other.” I was talking to one of my friends, who regularly composts, when I first started this project, and was like, “You have to read this book. You're going to get a kick out of it.” They're a gross composter, in my opinion. They like to touch it with their bare hands because they like how it feels and I'm like, “That's good for you.” And they were really into “you can stir the great mix.” And I kept thinking about that because my relationship with this person has changed over the years. And I think this is another form of compost, letting parts of a relationship go to bed, or rest or, maybe even die so that new parts of the relationship can form, or become, or give way to other things.
And I think I was spinning out feeling what's going on internally. When I start to feel overwhelmed, especially in really tense times, personal or political, I turn back to the land. I turn back to community. I think that's where all the real, true good work and good compost happens is with what's closest to you or what is most enduring. Land is enduring. I find that also to be true of community. Community is enduring. So, I started revisiting some of my writing about the prairie and some writing that traverses the idea of relationships that are composting, or ideas that are composting, to get back to some things that seem really basic. Like, how do we get back to things that the world is doing already, with or without us even paying attention? How do we get more entrenched in care? How do we compost these times, or how do we compost what is around us that is ready to be composted and move back into that space of renewal? I was really thinking about the prairie and about burning and about places I've been and people I've been and people I've been around and where we're going. The very last line in the writing I submitted says, “The sun is rising, let's go home.” And to me, that is a way of asking what story comes next? We've done this thing. We've talked all night, we've gone through it, we've done the compost and here comes the sun again. What's next?
[AM] There were a few that informed my work. “Things emerge as a natural consequence of all that is happening inside the soil body,” “small energies acting on each other, reacting to each other,” and “breaking down as building up.” I feel like I wrote from a place, like what Lydia is saying, that humans and nature aren't separate. A Lot of my practice comes from a place of grief and nonverbal communication and that’s very much an internal practice.
I used to be really involved in the natural world and gardening, and now I live in probably the most urban landscape in Omaha with not much green space around me. I'm working a lot, longing for a deep rest where I can have space and time to think about things like composting or things like working with herbs and plant medicine, which is something that has been a big part of my practice. Because of that, I feel this grief and the responsibility of having all this knowledge, all this experience, while being in a place in my life where I'm not able to fully activate it. So, I was thinking about it from that perspective and thinking about how the world of compost is so abundant, it's so interconnected, just like human complexity. I thought about brown matter and green matter like the two sides of the human brain working together and tried to connect these similarities. “Breaking down and building up” comes back to me a lot as I'm trying to do this work surrounding arts and culture, specifically with Black folks and folks of the African diaspora, and working to make sure the programing is still meaningful in a time where I feel like I'm kind of rushing around and just trying to get things done. This year is the 150th anniversary of Juneteenth and I’ve been finding similarities between that work, the work that I've done in urban agriculture, and seeing community gardens in places like Harlem and in the Bronx and folks like using like commercial compost from the New York City government, which I thought was so incredible. Why isn't the local government in Omaha doing something like that?
I’ve also been thinking a lot about unmarked graves and being a descendant of enslaved people and the research around how enslaved people were laid to rest. A lot of folks marked graves with plants like periwinkle they yucca plant, and daffodils, more wild, woodsy types of plants. I think there’s something about the way that bodies compost, especially bodies that aren't being recognized. I watched The Nickel Boys, a film about the Dozier School for Boys in Florida, which had many allegations of abuse during the Jim Crow era. It didn't end up closing until the early 2000s, despite those allegations of abuse. And the film depicted that. Once the school finally closed, they found 80 unmarked graves, folks who died or who were murdered on that land. So, I think about the way that our bodies decompose and become earth and feed the plants growing on unmarked graves and connecting those points.
I’m also thinking about compost and rest. It can be rest but it’s also work to make space and time for this mutual relationship and give and take. I think about how I can make myself accountable and responsible to give back to the earth in the same way that I’m receiving from it. So, I guess I came at this thinking a lot about accountability and exploring the wonder that is compost.
[PF] We’ve talked about composting relationships, composting, grief, composting histories, composting inheritances to carry certain forms of knowledge forward. It makes me wonder how composting can also serve as a kind of practical approach to care. And particularly in this moment, Lydia, like you brought up, that seems especially politically tense, how can compost stand to affect the way we move toward realizing a more ecologically just future? Is that too big of a question?
[LC] No, I think that's a great question. I just sighed so big just then because it is a big question. I think the thing that first comes to mind for me is that compost is a radical act because it puts people back into their own agency to be in relationship with what is around them. Especially with so many cuts being made to the EPA, so much oversight we had in place for environmental justice being done away with now, I think that compost becomes more radical because of that relationship between us and the natural world is being severed even further.
To become interested, to become aware and compost, is such an easy way into that system of reciprocity and care with what is around you. Typically, yes, it serves an immediate need, this is the immediate need of, I need to throw this away. This immediate need of trying to create something that I can use. This immediate need of my garden needs to eat. It's all really contained. And I think that that can be the win that you need sometimes. Here's this small thing that I can do when it’s actually not small at all. It’s massive. It does require this level of care that is often manageable. Not always, but it brings that awareness of what relationship looks like and requires. I think it's the gateway into having agency and maintaining agency, at a time when it feels like we're losing it, to remind ourselves that there are certain rights that can't actually be stripped away because they're so integral to who we are as beings. The job is to get your gloves on, or maybe don't get your gloves on. Whatever feels best.
[PC] Yeah, it's interesting to be in the times that we're in because everything feels amped up. I have been thinking a lot about the ways in which tech is this insidious presence in our lives. And I was recently somewhere and someone was like, “I work in tech.” And I was like, “What does that even mean? What do you actually do?” And they were like, “This is my second startup.” I was in Austin, Texas and the person, in the same breath was like, “I know how tech is ruining this city. I get it, but here's the thing: My family lives in South Texas, and Amazon, this corporation, told me that if I was going to work somewhere, I could either work in Seattle or here, and I wanted to be close to my family. So what was I supposed to do?” And I was like, “Oh, my God.” I mean, people need to provide for themselves and their families. I'm not judging those who work for tech. What I'm saying is that we are beings that have agency and, looking at the world around us, we have agency in so many ways, even when capitalism, or history, or the things we’ve inherited provide all kinds of restraints. After that conversation, I thought a lot about that Silicon Valley mantra, “move fast and break things” I don't really understand. And compost is such an interesting thing because it is breaking things down. It is breaking things. Fire is such an interesting thing because it can both destroy parts of L.A. and it is a necessary force people have used intentionally for generations to manage our relationship to land. It's funny to think about what timescale makes sense for breaking things. What is the intentionality and routine with which we can navigate controlled burns? What does it look like to be intentional about, and accountable to, places and people, and like all the more than human world? Compost provides this really apt model for thinking about those specifics because it's not that breaking things is bad. That's what compost is doing. And it's not that burning is bad, but it is about a specific kind of attention and accountability. Thinking about care as something that's both gross and manageable, like you said, Lydia, we can do this.
[AM] Those are both beautiful and thoughtful responses. Living in Omaha for the foreseeable future and being born and raised here, I think about how much has shifted from a developmental standpoint. Here, we’re constantly developing things like the airport, the library, the streetcar, all these demolitions are happening and, especially growing up and living in North Omaha, and seeing a lot of tree canopy being removed in the wake of surveying the land for that development. It makes me think about the uncertainty of climate change, especially in a place like Omaha. I think people sometimes, since we're not on the coast, tend to ignore it. But it's just as daunting and, at a time when we are having all these things that are inevitably creating waste, like when you're developing things and demolishing buildings, where does all that go? Recycling is so poorly managed and poorly educated in this city as well. So, I think we really don't have a choice but to compost to help the greenhouse gas emissions within our atmosphere here. When I am not holding myself accountable, not taking time, and I have maybe something rotting in my fridge that I throw out it’s like, “Okay, this is going to take at minimum three years to break down in a landfill,” whereas if I took it to someone's garden compost, it would be so much more beneficial.
Also, I do think that there needs to be much more general education about compost, and the benefits of compost, especially on the local level. Some spaces here have tried to be really generative and have composting available, but a lot of people don't even know what can go in a compost, and a lot of it ends up in a landfill anyways, or the energy it takes to make commercial compost and larger applications. You know, the City of Omaha is making this Climate Action Plan, but I just wish that, on a city level, our officials would prioritize human scaled applications rather than big developments.
[PF] You're all so wonderful. I really admire the work you're doing so much. Thank you for sharing it with us today. Are there any final thoughts you would like to add to the discussion before we sign off?
[LC] This is compost adjacent. I've been thinking about startups. In tech, everybody's in a startup, and maybe I don't fully understand the lifecycle of a startup, but there's something about it that I find interesting. I think about it in relation to compost and in relationship to institutional structure, where the job of every institution is to try and stay forever. But maybe that isn't the best way. I think there's something alluring to me about the startup because the startup knows that its lifecycle is short, and it is always allowing itself to arise and do a job and then dissolve and do the next job. There’s something that I find intriguing in this conversation about compost. How do we also think about the structures and organizations that we utilize in our day to day and when is a good time to let some of those structures go to compost?
[PC] Well, it's funny you say that. It reminds me that compost teaches us the simple binary of an enemy and a hero, or a good and a bad, an evil and a righteous, doesn't actually work. There are many beneficial ideas we can pull from even the worst histories, or the most ridiculous startup. And whether we put the gloves on or not, like you said, it's mainly about our presence and getting in there with that stuff and seeing what might actually provide some kind of mutual flourishing We're not there yet, but whether we have gloves on or not, we need to be working with all of this stuff and using this framework as a way of processing it.
[AM] That brings me back to Robin Wall Kimmerer's work and the idea of reciprocity. Compost is a lesson in reciprocity and a metaphor in many ways, as we're all saying, for reciprocity within our relationships, within our communities. I hope there’s a growing awareness around how our current systems are working, at the national level with the current administration, but also on a local level with the mayoral race coming. We don't have public spaces, we don't have affordable housing, and people are getting to a point where they're tired, you know. How is a city that I'm contributing to returning that investment and vice versa. And in the greater scope of our ecosystem, how can we reciprocate with the beings and the microbiome around us?
[PF] That's a great analogy too, for creative practice when it comes to the things we let go of and things we continue with, the things that transform and take different shapes. So, thank you again all for being here. Would you mind letting people know where they can see more of your work, whether that's social media, websites, whatever you're comfortable sharing?
[AM] People can find more about my work on Instagram, @afra_m00n. Also, Juneteenth Joyest is coming up Saturday June 21st. We're celebrating our fifth anniversary, so you can find more about that juneteenthjoyfest.com.
[LC] My work can be found on Instagram @goodwithcoffee and I also have a website. It's lydia-cheshewalla.com. And I'll be in a show that opens March 25th at Uncanny Art House in Norman, Oklahoma called, Indian Time curated by Alicia Smith.
[PC] I also have an Instagram. It's @_patrickcostello and my website is patrickjcostello.net. And if anyone's in New York, I have a studio on Governor's Island for the next eight months, so come visit.
[PF] Exciting. Thank you again all for being here. And thanks to MdW Atlas. Thanks to Public Media Institute. We really appreciate it. And we'll see you all soon.
*This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
About the Speakers:
Lydia Cheshewalla is an Osage ephemeral artist from Oklahoma, living and working in motion throughout the Great Plains ecoregion. Through the creation of site-specific land art and ephemeral installations grounded in Indigenous land stewardship practices and kinship pedagogies, Lydia engages in multivocal conversations about place and relationship. Her work has been shown at Generator Space, the Union for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE), Comfort Station, Harold Washington Library, EXPO Chicago, and the Center for Native Futures (Chicago, IL) among others. She is currently filling the bucket with water to see if it leaks and is often found standing in fields.
Patrick Costello is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in time-based mediums including installation and performance. His practice explores the impacts of history on present ecologies – giving specific attention to the collaborative relationships of care and control that define gardens and other cultivated landscapes. In 2024, Patrick received a MacDowell Fellowship and presented a new performance as the Artist-in-Residence at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. He has exhibited work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY; and Stone Quarry Hill Art Park, Cazenovia, NY. He has performed in venues including Ars Nova, New York, NY; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; and The Public Theater, New York, NY. He holds an MFA from Hunter College and a BA from the University of Virginia.
Alajia McKizia is a dedicated artist, curator, and community organizer with over eight years of experience working within community, urban agriculture, creativity, and culture. She is the founder of The Joy Ambition, a grassroots arts nonprofit focused on creating access to creativity as a source of healing and joy, and a Content Developer at Kiewit Luminarium, where she develops and generates content for new exhibits. Currently serving as the Nebraska Fellow for Creative West’s National Leaders of Color fellowship, she focuses on how thoughtful community and creative interaction. In 2021, she launched Juneteenth JoyFest, a Black Arts and Culture festival that has grown from a backyard gathering to an event hosting over 1,300 attendees and generating over $25,000 for Omaha’s Black economy, supporting Black artists, businesses, and entrepreneurs. She has led numerous creative placemaking projects near N. 24th Street, including coordinating a mural project for the North Omaha Trail to address environmental racism and activate public spaces. Through initiatives like Sunday Soul, a series uplifting women poets, musicians, dancers, and change-makers, and programs supporting seniors, Alajia bridges generational gaps and celebrates ancestral legacies. Her work exemplifies the transformative power of storytelling, leadership, and the arts to honor history, inspire community, and envision a creative, joyful, and equitable future.