12 December 2024
MossWorlds is an interdisciplinary project investigating the historical, contemporary and future importance of mosses, focusing on the Greater Manchester area for this pilot stage. Our principal aim is to ‘re-story’ moss, bringing together Manchester’s botanical, civic and aesthetic ‘worlds’ of moss in order to develop creative and interdisciplinary methods for addressing socio-ecological crisis. Mosses in general, but especially in urban spaces, have often been overlooked or relegated to the margins. More recently, however, mosses have started to gain attention as bio-indicators of urban pollution, markers of place and belonging, and aesthetic signals of a variety of ethical concerns and values. Our project draws these different worlds of moss to the fore, experimenting with different ways of knowing and narrating mosses through a series of interdisciplinary workshops, bringing together a team of academic colleagues from a variety of schools within Humanities and FSE, the Manchester Museum and Firs Environmental Research Station, as well as practicing artists. The workshops provide a space for developing a shared language and methodology for knowing mosses, and a prompt for ongoing, re-iterative thinking about the relationships within and across botanical, civic and aesthetic worlds of moss in relation to ongoing urban social and ecological crises.
MossWorlds 