The Mekong Delta: A patchwork of mud fabrics

According to Malleret (1959a), the Mekong River Delta was nothing other than “mud, and people passing by.” The architecture of its territory (Gregotti, 1983) is a vast, ever-evolving plain defined by the fluid materiality of mud, muddy waters, and watery lands. Generated and continuously transformed by a complex interaction of geo-fluvial morphological forces and human interventions, it has been inhabited for millennia. Contemporary policies continue to aggressively wrest dry land from this watery morass. Yet the delta resists and remains a predominantly agricultural and aquacultural region dependent on the abundance and quality of its waters. Despite—or precisely because of—its reliance on mud, the territory displays remarkable stability, resistance, and resilience. Mud appears shockproof and endlessly malleable. The architecture of this territory has been produced, repeatedly and out of necessity, as a gigantic earthwork, a “project of the soil” (Secchi, 1986), in which humans strive to impose order and a categorical distinction between land and water. Relatively small-scale indigenous practices of settling with mud are superimposed upon by massive imperial or extractivist interventions. Today, this vast patchwork of mud fabrics is sinking unevenly due to dramatic subsidence and rising sea levels. Nonetheless, mud sculpturing continues. Based on 20 years of design research in the delta, this paper traces the bio-materialism of this mega mud sculpture, from the longue durée of conventional historical epochs to the “ histoire immédiate ” (Verhaegen, 1974) of the present.