MossWorlds is an interdisciplinary project funded by the University of Manchester Research Institute (UMRI) that investigates the historical, contemporary and future importance of mosses, with the pilot phase of the project focusing on the Greater Manchester area. The project speaks to the Creative Manchester strand of Civic and Creative Places, focusing on human encounters with moss, the civic spaces in which these take place, and the stories we tell about them. We attend to the ways the botanical study of mosses (bryology) has historically participated in and contributed to civic and educational reform. Aesthetic judgement and ethical values were central to both botany and political reform. Focusing on Manchester’s central role in this story, our interdisciplinary project brings together academics and artistic practitioners in a range of indoor and outdoor civic spaces.
Commonly considered irrelevant to human needs and uses, easily overlooked and hard to identify, moss is often relegated to the margins. In recent decades, however, the importance of mosses as both ‘pioneer species’ and as indicator species for pollution monitoring has become increasingly clear. Mosses’ particular characteristics have also made them attractive to thinkers seeking to imagine new ways of communal living and being. MossWorlds thus focuses on the following three interconnected ‘worlds’ that coalesce around and through moss: the botanical, the political and the aesthetic. From these, we will develop an interdisciplinary creative methodology to address a civic future impacted by crises that are both ecological and social.
The stories we tell matter; we need better stories.
MossWorlds 