FarmLab is a creative garden space and workshop for the sustainability-inclined. In front of the warehouse space is a corn field project entitled “Not A Corn Field.” The title, and perhaps the project itself, is derived from the traditional slang for the swath of land next to the train tracks– The Corn Field. You turn around to see large water-catchment barrels with images of birds and the molecular symbol for water. Old beaters sit outside the warehouse, collecting rust, but also blooming flowers.
The warehouse itself is a mish-mosh of offices, artist spaces and meeting places. In the back, you can find a garden complete with a hydroponic setup for strawberries, waterfalls, couches, and chicken trailers.
Each Friday, they hold a salon– the Metabolic Studio Public Salon, to be exact– and invite a guest speaker to lecture as the participants munch on a light lunch provided. At the last salon, the guest speaker was Nance Klehm, a composter-extraordinaire. The salon was entitled, “Everything Comes Into This World Hungry.” Klehm’s talk vacillated between poetic descriptions of our place in the world of soil, powerpoint videos of composting-in-action, and anecdotes describing her work in land remediation.
One video showed several interns helping to squash some delicata squash destined for the compost. There were too many to chop, so they all decided to run them over with a car (which I thought was ‘so L.A.’).
An image of the remediation project in Wendover, UT showed a couple participants dousing urine onto carbonaceous material. Nance said that in just 8 months, this pee plus carbon concoction became soil.
Klehm’s “Humble Pile” project was also quite interesting. She invited people to poop in buckets– adding sawdust along the way– in order to contribute to human manure composting. She received 1500 gallons of this mixture, collecting it in large, lidded bins. The raw material (what Klehm called “donations”) was dumped into a composting container made with tarps and cinder blocks.
An image of this “humble pile” revealed a wide array of colors, one of which Nance called ochre as she commented on this diverse excremental palette. “What are people eating?!,” she exclaimed.
Here’s one last Nance Klehm tidbit: when urine evaporates, it leaves saltpeter, a main ingredient in gunpowder. You can make gunpowder with pee!
At the end of her lecture, Nance unveiled a compost toilet (just for pee) that the interns had built, and asked all of the guests to make a ‘donation’ to the potty.
The food provided at the Salon was made by the interns. They made the bread by hand, topped it with two different spreads, and served it with a yummy coconut curry soup. Many elements of the meal came right from the garden outside. I spoke with an intern, Keondra, as she helped spread the bread. Keondra been working with FarmLab for 2 and a half months and was assigned the internship through a youth career program. “Everything here is new to me,” she said, “the goats, the chickens…[learning] different ways to grow stuff for the urban environment.” Keondra feels that FarmLab gives her hope, because they are “thinking of future survival– of stuff going wrong” and the experiments conducted there can help with that future.
Another FarmLab participant, Jaime Lopez Wolters, began his work with the organization in 2005, when Not A Corn Field was just getting started. Jaime worked with corn farmers in Guatemala prior to coming to L.A., and used this past experience to manage the hand-sown acre of Not Cornfield. He now aids FarmLab in their various current projects, including an aquaponic strawberry field at the Los Angeles V.A. in the shape of an American flag.
I asked Jaime, “Why art plus ecology? What do these two things have to do with each other?”
“Under the guise of art,” he said, “you can get a lot more done.”
People are much more willing to allow an art installation, which may be considered temporary (and will be pleasing to the eye), than, say, a permanent garden. Hence the name “Metabolic Studio,” Jaime said, “It’s always changing.”
