Author: Polytrichum
Cape Horn
During our trip to Navarino, in the Chilean part of Patagonia, we will follow the same approach as in Kilpisjärvi, Finland, alternating between visits, interviews and a residency all throughout a month between December 2021 and January 2022. The residency of two weeks will be in the Omora ethnobotanical parc (Parque Etnobotanico Omora), located in…
Kilpisjärvi
Affiliated with the University of Helsinki, the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station allows researchers and students to stay there to study cultural and natural sciences in the northern region of Finland. The project acquired a residency of two weeks there that used to observe and collect samples of bipolar bryophytes. We alternated between observations in situ to…
Places
KILPISJÄRVI CAPE HORN MONTREAL BOTANICAL GARDEN
Moss garden
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…
Electronics
We are creating installations (Cybryonts) that each combines ceramics sculptures, microclimate remote monitoring devices and moss gardens and aim at exploring/imagining the world lived by the mosses in different polar regions (among them, Kilpisjärvi), in particular facing the shifting of their ecosystems conditions. Every of those unit is centered around a ceramics structure that is…
Cybryonts
This Research-Creation project aims at researching and fabricating “cybryonts”, i.e. symbioses between bryophytes (“mosses”), cybernetic sculptures and biofuel cells, in the time of the Anthropocene. The main concept of the project resides in creating semi-autonomous symbioses between elementary life forms and non-anthropomorphic Cybernetic sculptures in designed environments. Its ultimate goal, quite unrealistic today, is the…
Anthropocene
I believe that growth will grind to a halt. The total collapse of the industrial monopoly on production will be the result of synergy in the failure of the multiple systems that fed its expansion (…) This crisis may be triggered by an unforeseen event, as the Great Depression was touched off by the Wall…
Mosses
Mosses are the residual scum, the thread memory rising from the moment their algal ancestors rose from the shores of a receding primordial ocean. Bryophytes, their scientific name, means what grows, multiplies and proliferates; from the Greek brúon, “moss”, and the verb brúo (as in embryo), to grow in abundance, to ferment, and phutón, “plant,…
Team members
The Critical Gardening Collective is a collective consisting of members Thierry Bardini, Francois-Joseph Lapointe, Beatriz Herrera, Bastien Gauthier-Soumis, Arnaud Mery and Eva Giard. Each member brings unique experience from the varying fields of Media Theory, Microbiology, Ceramics, and Ecology. The members work between the realms of theory, science, and art-making; building on a fringe tradition…
Photos Finlande