Moss grows at Floating University in unexpected places and in unthinkable forms. Far from romanticised ideas of soft moss covering rocks in the forest, here moss grows over rusted steel structures, in symbiosis with decaying concrete or polluted water. This workshop is an immersive experience in the world of moss. It consists of exercises and explorations that focus on different qualities of moss such as resilience and adaptability, sexuality and dispersal, water holding, symbioses and interactions.
Together we will spend time with the mosses, becoming intimate with them, their habitats and co-habitants through sensorial immersion, somatic meditation, readings, drawing, mapping and microscoping.
The workshop MicroCosMoss was conceived and realised first in context of the MATTER OF FLUX Research Network, organised by Art Laboratory Berlin.
It has been developped by Jacky Hess, Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, Lucy Powell and Susanne Jaschko. Each version of the workshop adapts to its environment.
Jacky Hess is a Berlin-based evolutionary biologist and enthusiast of all things small and ephemeral. She has researched the origins of symbioses of fungi and plants, evolutionary ecology of wood decomposer fungi and now works in synthetic biology.
Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky is an artist based in Berlin. She grew up in nature with the forest and its inhabitants as her kin. Using cultural, scientific and personal stories she works with plant specimens experimenting with analogue photography.
Lucy Powell is a UK artist based in Berlin whose research-based practice is part of a wider ontological inquiry into more-than-human nature and how to be in the world today. Choosing to work outside the gallery space, she creates walks, workshops, maps, audio works, participatory performances and books.
Under the label prozessagenten, Dr Susanne Jaschko explores new ways of learning collaboratively and generating knowledge through co-creation, interdisciplinarity and sensory experience. She also works as a cultural manager and curator.
You can register for this workshop at climatecare@floating-berlin.org.
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