is a nomadic research project that investigates bryophyte-inspired methodologies of adaptation, collaboration, survival and care in an attempt to create new imaginaries in this world in crisis, and act as a platform for equipping ourselves for instability.
By developing hybrid forms of workshops, where the boundaries between shared experience, scientific knowledge and fiction become intertwined, MOSSS takes you into a space of encounter and co-learning with humans and the more-than-humans, combining exploratory walks and sensory experiences.
is composed by
Mélanie Ganino and Sarah Drapeau.
How can we learn to navigate through instability and the various crisis we will continuously be facing?
We defined anti-fitness as a teaching after our discovery on the adaptative mechanism of mosses: they actually don't have any. They don't adapt, but rather stay constant as they haven't evolved through times, which allowed them to survive for millions of years (450 millions) just as they are. They don't try to fit into environments, they live and grow if the conditions feel right, if not, they just don't. Mosses are not complex organisms and don't evolve according to environmental changes.
By introducing feeling-thinking as a teaching, we want to bring awareness to the necessity of learning through experiential and sensorial means by performing knowledges to better understand our ecosystems and the complexity of existence.
The concept of feeling-thinking (sentipensar) was created by sociologist Orlando Fals-Borda to describe a way of living in which the heart and the mind jointly construct the relationship with the world.
For the anthropologist Arturo Escobar, this concept allows to overcome the binary separations between feeling and thinking, body and mind, that forge the regimes of modernity and coloniality.
mosses as radical soft creatures
mosses inviting us to explore with our senses
mosses teaching us how to become radicaly soft
mosses teachings being a methodology for our radical soft side to fully become alive
How can we develop our membrane to be sensitive to our environment and still be protected and keep our boundaries?
A bioindicator is any species or group of species whose function, population, or status can reveal the qualitative status of the environment.
We freely define the term Biorevelation as being a sensor of a system and to see our sensitivity as an opportunity to reveal a systemic issue. How can our sensitivity as individuals indicates something about a systemic problem ?
The teaching Feel-think occurred to us while encountering mosses and trying to answer the question: how can we learn from them and share their knowledge ?
It was an actual need to not only think while trying to grasp the wonders and fantastic capacities of mosses, but also to feel, with our senses, what they could teach us, in order to grasp better/wider/queerer the reach of their wisdom.
A cryptogam (scientific name Cryptogamae) is a plant (in the wide sense of the word) or a plant-like organism that reproduces by spores, without flowers or seeds. The name Cryptogamae (from Ancient Greek κρυπτός (kruptós) 'hidden', and γαμέω (gaméō) 'to marry') means "hidden reproduction", referring to the fact that no seed is produced, thus cryptogams represent the non-seed bearing plants.
Mosses have the particularity to have no roots, and get their nutrients mainly from the rain and the water in the air onto their entire body, which makes them very sensitive to the atmospheric components. That's why they are studied as bioindicators to inform about the status of the environment.
Mosses happen to be a bit less sensitive than lichen to polluants, thanks to a thin protective membrane they developed.
What happens if we consider language as a tool to build more diversity in the way we observe relationships/beings?
"Queer use: when we aim to shatter what has provided a container."Sarah Ahmed, Queer vandalism, 2019
What happens if we shape our language and stories so to allow more openness and diversity of forms / relations / interpretations to arise?
through our observations and diaolgues with various knowledge holders like amongst others, bryologists, biogeochimist, artists, Polytrichum, neuroscientist, Parmelia, choreographers, faciatherapist, mosses lovers from different corner of the Europe.. from these encounters and transdisciplinary research, we have highlighted teachings and formulated what could become a moss paradigm, a cosmology from which our relation to the ecosystem would be intertwined and where our ability to thrive in instability could become more copable.
We most of the time observe mosses as being a composition of multiple beings, patches, communities in the environment. Is it possible to look at them as individuals?
We freely associated the term crypto (understood as cryptic, mysterious) with game (understood as the play, and the notion of mariage)
Looking at ecologies through the queer spectrum offers a possibility to redefine and to question the dualities and relations we observe in our ecosystems.
Can we define the limits of our body as being an immutable thing separating us from the rest of our ecosystem?
