Compost for Wild Weeds 
A Conversation on Disobedient Art and Collective Learning

Dialogue between Frida (Fossil Free Culture NL) and David Limaverde (Home of Participation)

David and Frida are two of the current gardeners of the Disobedient Art School, a project growing from the soil of Fossil Free Culture NL. On 13 December at OT301 they will launch the first publication, Compost for Wild Weeds. In this conversation they unpack the school’s origins, its commitments, and why they treat art as infrastructure for social movements. Think of .d.a.s. as an anti-extractivist, travelling assemblage that appears where it is needed and disappears before it hardens - choreographing care and critical practice across activism, pedagogy, and art.

David:
We’re speaking from Fossil Free Culture NL’s new office space at OT301 in Amsterdam, and in about a month we’ll launch a small publication, Compost for Wild Weeds, which sketches the conceptual foundations of .d.a.s., the Disobedient Art School. I joined the project quite recently, yet it has already absorbed a large part of my attention and imagination. Across the table sits you, Frida, who has been nurturing this dream for more than two years. Maybe you can tell us how it first took root, what urgency or conditions made .d.a.s. necessary?

Not a building, not a brand, but an art project that is a gathering of practices that refuse the “greenwashing” of artistic production

Frida:
It didn’t start as a school, actually. It began as an urgency. In 2020, while working as an artist and activist within the climate justice networks in Amsterdam, I saw how people involved were burning out, not only from activism, but from institutional complicity disguised as “sustainability.” Out of that exhaustion came the idea of the Disobedient Art School: not a building, not a brand, but an art project that is a gathering of practices that refuse the “greenwashing” of artistic production.

In my experience within the climate justice movement, I’ve learned a great deal about self-organisation and strategic thinking. I was combining those insights with collaborative artistic practices I developed during my past work. At the same time, Fossil Free Culture NL was being invited by art schools and activist groups to give workshops on art and activism. We were both teaching and unlearning, you inside the art-education machine, and me as an outsider. But both of us watched how “criticality” became another commodity. So we thought: what if we create a space that learns through disobedience, where art doesn’t serve the system but questions its infrastructures and acts on what’s unjust?

David:
As an art educator, I often struggle with the word “school.” It immediately suggests structure, curriculum, evaluation, all those things we usually want to unlearn. So how can disobedience survive inside something called a school? That’s the paradox we keep dancing with. Every disobedient initiative risks being institutionalised the moment it starts to work. We try to stay aware of that danger by keeping the school mobile and porous, a travelling assemblage that appears where it is needed and disappears before it hardens.

We collaborate with collectives, universities, and activist groups, but we resist fixing ourselves to any single structure. Disobedience is not chaos; it’s a careful choreography of refusal. And it requires companionship, a network of care and critical friends who remind us when our own disobedience starts to look too comfortable. We often joke that the first lesson of the Disobedient Art School is: don’t believe in the Disobedient Art School. So yes, disobedience is not a metaphor; it’s a method we have to keep re-learning together.

Frida:
No, it’s a method. Disobedience here means saying no to extractivism, not just of natural resources, but of people’s attention, emotions, and time. It’s about resisting the logic of productivity that seeps into everything, including activist and artistic work.

When we say disobedient, we mean relational disobedience, against individualism, competition, and the idea that care can be separated from conflict. Conflict can be productive if it’s treated as a teacher. We’re not interested in comfort; we’re interested in staying with the discomfort of contradictions.

David, maybe you could share a bit about the place of this project in the middle of this triad: activism, pedagogy and art? Is there a balance in this triad?

David:
For me, the triad of activism, pedagogy, and art can’t be balanced like a scale, it has to be folded into one practice. Teaching is already a political act, and activism is a pedagogy of risk and imagination. At .d.a.s., we try to slow both down, to stay with questions longer than institutions usually allow. We don’t aim to “raise awareness”; we aim to transform relations. Sometimes that means cancelling a workshop to join a protest, or bringing the protest into the workshop.

We learn from artists who work in occupied spaces, from communities defending water and land, from everyday gestures of refusal that never reach the headlines. These encounters push us toward an ecocentric practice, one that understands learning as a living ecosystem of relations rather than a transaction of knowledge.

Frida:
To work ecocentrically means decentering the human, not erasing ourselves, but recognising that we are part of a much larger web of relations. In .d.a.s., this shift changes everything: how we think, how we make, how we organise, even how we listen. It means that decisions aren’t only about efficiency or consensus among people, but about sensing what the ecosystem, human and more-than-human, can actually hold.

Nonhuman relations inform our practice in very concrete ways. We try to notice the rhythms of the season, the limits of our own bodies, the moods of the spaces we inhabit. Sometimes the weather, the soil, or the decay of materials becomes part of the choreography of our work. We take seriously that our infrastructures, from computers to the streets, are alive with dependencies, extractive histories, and potential for repair. Ecocentric practice, for us, is about humility and interdependence. It’s an invitation to unlearn the idea that art or activism are human-centred activities and to approach them instead as ecological gestures, as ways of participating, however temporarily, in a living system that is always bigger than us.

David:
I keep returning to one word that feels central to our practice: anti-extractive. To work anti-extractively means creating conditions where learning doesn’t depend on exploiting time, precarity, or emotional labour. Most art institutions still run on those invisible extractions, the unpaid intern, the overextended teacher, the performative inclusion policy. Anti-extractive work starts by naming these contradictions instead of hiding them behind progressive language.

It’s also about how we treat knowledge itself. Europe keeps extracting concepts from the Global South while forgetting their roots. Thinkers like Ailton Krenak and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui remind us that knowledge can be a colonial weapon when it’s detached from the lands and struggles that nurtured it. So we ask: what would it mean to return knowledge to the soil, to let it decompose a bit before using it again? And that brings me to the metaphor of our publication. Why “compost” and “wild weeds”? What do these figures say about our method?

Frida:
We chose compost and wild weeds because they both speak to the kind of transformation we’re trying to practice at .d.a.s. Compost is what remains after decomposition, but it’s also what makes new life possible. It’s a slow, collective process where what has been discarded, failures, leftovers, contradictions, is broken down and turned into nutrients for what’s flourishing.

In that sense, Compost for Wild Weeds is both a publication and a gesture: we’re trying to compost our own practices, our institutional experiences, our inherited ways of knowing, and see what kind of new ground they can feed. The wild weeds are all of us who don’t fit within the establishment but keep breaking through nonetheless. The ones that are resilient, unruly, and unwanted by the monocultures of art, academia, or even activism.

Weeds are also teachers: they remind us that life insists on growing in the cracks, that regeneration happens in the margins, and that not everything needs to be cultivated or controlled. So, the metaphors together describe a method of transformation through decay, and learning through what’s usually considered waste or discomfort. .d.a.s. is not about producing polished outcomes but about tending to the messy, fertile processes where art and activism decompose and regenerate each other.

David:
As you’ve been in grassroots movements for over a decade, you understand the constant motion between the micro and the macro, the local and the systemic. How do you see .d.a.s. operating in that movement? How can it contribute to broader struggles for climate justice and cultural transformation without losing its intimacy? I often wonder how a project like ours can stay small enough to be sensitive yet wide enough to have impact.

Frida:
We see .d.a.s. as part of the broader ecosystem of climate justice, as a space that cultivates the inner and collective conditions needed to sustain long-term struggle. So much of activism today happens under enormous pressure: urgency, exhaustion, burnout. What we’re trying to do is create space for slow, critical reflection, where learning and imagination become tools for collective repair.

Cultural transformation doesn’t happen only through policy making or protest; it also happens through shifts in perception, in how we relate, in what we value as knowledge. .d.a.s. invites people to practice those shifts. It’s a place where artists, activists, educators, and academics can rehearse new ways of being together, ways that resist extractivism not just in the material sense but in the intellectual and emotional ones too.

If we do this well, our contribution is not a finished model but a living method: an example of how art can act as infrastructure for social movements, how learning can become a creative act of solidarity, and how imagination can be reclaimed as a political force.

David:
As we come to the end of this conversation, we’d love to invite everyone to the publication launch of Compost for Wild Weeds on 13 December 2025 at OT301. This is the moment to meet, read together, and help shape what .d.a.s. becomes next. We also want to share that, in early 2026, we’ll host a practice-sharing workshop with the Green School of IETM(International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts). Under the working title “Performing Climate Justice Amid ‘Green’ Contradictions,” we’ll connect theatre and dance practices with ecological struggles, focusing on disobedient pedagogies and anti-extractive methods. Our hope is that .d.a.s. can link up with collectives, organisations, artists, and activists who care about climate justice, so we can rehearse, together, forms of learning that refuse extraction and cultivate solidarity.

Together with artists and activists we will explore how performance can repair broken relations between humans and other-than-human agents. We’re also dreaming of a network of “satellite schools,” small, temporary gatherings across Europe and Latin America, each adapting the principles of disobedient pedagogy to its own ecology and conflicts. These dreams are already becoming real in the coming months. So, Frida, how do you imagine .d.a.s. evolving in the next years?

Frida:
We don’t imagine .d.a.s. as something that will grow in scale, but in depth. Its evolution depends on what comes up in this upcoming gathering and the relationships it cultivates. We hope it continues to move between forms: sometimes a workshop space, sometimes a collective rehearsal, sometimes a constellation of gatherings, texts, and gestures that keep feeding each other.

In the coming years, we imagine .d.a.s. as a porous infrastructure: a network of learning spaces and situated experiments that can take root in different contexts. It might appear in a workshop room, a kitchen, a field, or a protest camp, wherever people are trying to learn differently or to challenge the unjust, with care and disobedience.

We also want it to remain compostable, able to decompose and regenerate according to the needs of those who hold it. The aim isn’t to institutionalise a method but to keep the conditions alive for collective transformation. If it keeps provoking questions, nurturing alliances, and offering tools for other struggles, then it’s evolving in the right direction.

Invitation
13 December 2025 — Launch of Compost for Wild Weeds and Disobedient Art School workshops. Location, time, and full description to follow via Fossil Free Culture NL’s channels. More info about the event