Designs for Ex-SwampDesign Indaba
For her work Ex-Swamp, Namibian designer Frauke Stegmann designed and installed a plaque which memorializes the loss of a once rich marshland.
Sixty years ago, located in what is now the city center of Windhoek (Namibia), the water from a natural mountain hot-spring trickled down and gathered in a luxuriant marshland – stories from the 1940s still witness the nocturnal call of a thousand frogs.
Ex-SwampDesign Indaba
In the 1960s, the spring that fed the marshland was closed by the Apartheid administration due to urban development, and consequently the swamp dried out along with all the biodiversity – leaving behind a dry, dusty, hot sandpan which today is used as a taxi rank.
An informal memorial
The plaque remembers the vanished swamp and all the biodiversity lost when the natural water source feeding it was closed – since then, earth has lost at least seventy percent of all its fauna and flora.
Ex-SwampDesign Indaba
During the day, the color of the ex-swamp site glitters in a dry beige (glitter due to the mica stone in the area) – at sunset, everything is covered in a golden glow – the brass material of the plaque tries to capture that.
