Women have had the experience of seeing everything they have done destroyed day by day. We consider incomplete a history that has been built on non-perishable traces. [1]
In 1970, Carla Lonzi, together with the Rivolta Femminile group, wrote a Manifesto in which she urged women to discredit the foundations of culture that defined them as subordinate beings and urged them to consider their narrative as incomplete. To this end, her insistence on the need to rescue the traces of the perishable is particularly noteworthy.
In 2023, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the moment when, in 1973, a group of young women architects decided to organize an archive of the work of the women architects who responded to their call.[2] Material from this archive was subsequently displayed in an exhibition in 1977 and in the book[3] Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective, both coordinated by Susana Torre. This archive was eventually moved to Virginia Tech, through the intervention of Dr. Milka T. Bliznakov, who in 1985 founded the International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA),[4] and joined its collections in 1990. IAWA is an international reference and a major source of research.
Now, like Lonzi, we ask what those perishable traces are that would have written a different history and how to preserve them. The questions that also arise are how these different traces have been dismissed or undervalued,[5] how an incomplete narrative has been constructed, ignoring other kinds of results or hiding those that did not fit established patterns. This conference is a call to ask ourselves together what we want, what we are looking for, based on existing experiences and reflections. Initially, no thematic lines are proposed, but these will be organized to structure the conference according to the material received.
As an initial guide, some questions are proposed:
How can we reconstruct the history of women architects and their (other) work?
What is the current situation of the historiographical review of some women architects or even professionals in other disciplines who have contributed one or more projects to the field of architecture?
What are the current editorial challenges? How should archived material be disseminated? What is the agency of this archived material?
Where are or should the resources or files be? What types of devices? What is the integrity of a file? How are they accessed?
How do new technologies affect them? How do algorithms access archived information? How does data feminism work? How do we visualise information?
[1] Carla Lonzi, Escupamos sobre hegel y otros escritos (Madrid: Traficante de Sueños, 2018), 23.
[2] Ellen Perry Berkeley, Women in Architecture, Architectural Forum 137, no. 2 (1972): 46-53.
[3] Susana Torre, Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective. A publication and exhibition organized by the Architectural League of New York through its Archive of Women in Architecture (New York: Whitney Library of design, 1977).
[4] International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA), Virginia Tech Special Collections University Libraries,” n.d.
[5] Daniela Arias Laurino, La Construcción del relato arquitectónico y las arquitectas de la modernidad. Un análisis feminista de la historiografía, TDX (Tesis Doctorals En Xarxa, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, October 5, 2018).
Deadlines
CALL FOR PAPERS
IS CLOSED
EXTENDED DEADLINE
Submissions of complete papers:
June 20th 2023
Notification to authors:
July 12th 2023
Final submission of complete papers:
July 24th 2023
Submission of PPTs:
September 12th 2023
Abstracts and communications are accepted in English, Spanish and Portuguese. They will be published in the book of communications in the language in which the communication was submitted.