In order to adequately problematize the “undecided” nature of the Anthropocene and “live in its trouble”, we will focus our attention on so-called bipolar mosses. In proposing to create a garden of mosses, we intend to make a world with forms of life once described as “primitive” or “inferior”, but which we prefer to call “minor” (in the sense of Gilles Deleuze).
What is an ecological community? Could we translate those relations into a garden – a novel ecosystem of misplaced wanderers and locals? Maybe, looking at the enclosed gardens of the Arabs, those miniature symbolic versions of paradise evoked from within a tightly controlled whorl of earthly power… maybe the point could be something other than that controlled contemplation of the order of things, but be a speculative break from normality. Maybe a garden’s real purpose is not so much for meditative contemplation, but as a form of moving material speculation through which we can meet up with other life forms? As our entire planet has already turned into tightly simplistic structural series of land use strategies we need a pause, a counter to the barrage of stimuli from the bright maps of productive leisure we’re all submitted to by the non-spaces of highway-strip-mall-development-airport-tarmac-parking-golf-lawn-playground-asphalt-hell-strips? Gardens: speculative ecologies of interruption; communal spaces of maybe; fungal, bacterial, pheremonal, material architectures of carbon quenchers and boosters to support the photosynthesizers…and to a human it might look like beauty, but beauty as a subterranean physical silence to break the fabric of our daily straightness. Maybe I’ve failed so far, but as I brush up close to the spotted muzzle of a reindeer amid the mosses, bilberries and dwarf birches of this sub-artic Krummholz forest I can begin to imagine some of the ingredients.