The art of marsh-thinking as ecological care

This article arises from me happening across paintings of marshlands at Pescara’s Museo dell’Ottocento. A four-part corpus is the focus of my visual analysis: Alberto Pasini’s ‘Twilight’ (1855); Giuseppe Castiglione’s ‘Landscape’ (1870); Charles-François Daubigny’s ‘Landscape with Lake’ (1872); Alceste Campriani’s ‘Sunset with Birds’ (1885). I question processes of value attribution and emotional attachment to do with a type of semi-aquatic ecosystem at some remove from capitalist practices. My deep-dive interpretations emphasise the significance of fluxional micro-worlds that would benefit from more caring-about in the present. The results of this Abruzzian observational case-study comprise musings on style and content ranging from waterside vegetation to patterns of species-typical behaviour. I come to the conclusion that such artworks are suited to galvanising observers’ sense of empathy and co-responsibility within the Earth System’s assemblage of entities spanning the human and the more-than-human.