Charlotte Marie Henrich Y4
Typha Tales of (Un)taming Swamps The marshland in the Pontine Plain is already a place where the line between nature and human settlements is fluid. With a long history of failed human attempts to tame the marshes, the fascist regime's implementation of the rather recent pump system in the 1930s drained the land, enabling current excessive farming practices and thus accelerating soil and habitat degradation. The historic Pontine nature is replaced with culture.
Therefore, the Marsh Clinic is introduced acting as a bridge where fluidity and solidity of land come together, creating an emerging marshland habitat symbiosing human and non-human activities, as the American professor Donna Haraway set out. Identifying Typha as a natural purifier of polluted land and water, the common marshland plant is intended to be enabled as the main material of the Marsh Clinic, contributing to its carbon-positive footprint. Where Typha takes over the land, the Marsh Clinic nests within to requalify and heal the area and labour workers so that it can return to its natural state. In the challenge of the right to the marsh to establish a cohesive Nature Culture, the Marsh Clinic is embracing an alternative way of living and renewing traditions of commons for the healing of the people and the land.
