FEMINIST
“Designers of the built environment employing feminist frameworks often challenge men as the hegemonic subject or frame of reference, to subvert the prevailing practice of deploying the female body as object or sign, or/and to re-frame the organization of space in pursuit of changing gender roles in society..”
— Wid Bibliography 2nd Ed.
Seu, Mindy, Patricia M. Hernandez, and Roxana Fabius. The Scalability Project. Brooklyn, NY: A.I.R. Gallery, November 30th, 2020–May 30th, 2021.
[online exhibition]
The Scalability Project: Cacophony of Troubled Stories is a website, an online exhibition and publication, including artworks, texts, and interviews with and by adrienne maree brown, biarritzzz, Daria Dorosh, Felice Grodin, Gordon Hall, Melanie Hoff, Nahee Kim, Klau Kinky, Tabita Rezaire, Naama Tsabar, Anna L. Tsing and Rebecca Jordan Young. The pieces shown in this project represent caretaking in a number of ways and address concepts of disturbance, re-tooling, non-hierarchy and circularity. Each piece alone, and all in conversation, attempt to scale up feminism to alternative and multitudinal systems of belief. A goal of the project to encourage non-linear movement through concepts and scales is reflected in both the content and the form of the website itself, extending the performance to the platform.
“These elements gesture towards events, actions, and phenomena that share different visions on feminisms, all of which grow not through homogenizing universalisms but through encounters and coalitions. In the interstices of our encounters, our togetherness, we might see a leak, a crack, a glitch. In this cacophony of troubled stories, we begin to discern the discordant melodies of differing and conflicting realities.”
F-architecture’s Representative Bodies project was a co-production with the Achimama’s of Amupakin, a group of Amazonian Kichwa women, during the UN-HABITAT III Conference in Quito, Ecuador. The project encompassed multiple parts, none of them a building, in an effort to challenge the UN’s programming and discourse around the “New Urban Agenda,” which purported to include a greater public in its work. Each part of Representative Bodies gave presence to the indigenous women and their worldviews within the governmental, formal space of the UN conference. The work of giving women presence in spaces of women’s subjugation or marginalization emerges as a theme beyond Representative Bodies in f-architecture’s work. This project included a publication, Representative Bodies: A Critical Agenda for Habitats Beyond the Urban to last beyond the conference itself.
“Sarah Rafson: Do you ever see this as creating a new space in feminism in architecture, too? Or would you rather not even be defined in those terms?
Gabrielle Printz: ...What we’re doing is trying to make architecture’s feminism more intersectional and really apply it as a form of practice. As often as we assert ourselves as architects, even as people who aren’t practicing conventionally, we also endow so many others with the title ‘architect’ by examining their work in that way, and I think that is one important method of making architecture more expansive.”
Norton, Eleanor Holmes, Maxine Williams, Frances Beal, and Linda La Rue. “Black Women’s Manifesto.” Duke Digital Collections, 1970-1975. [manifesto]
Black Women’s Manifesto is a 52-page pamphlet distributed by the Third World Women’s Alliance in the early 1970s, including four chapters: For Sadie and Maude by Eleanor Holmes Norton, Black Women and the Struggle for Liberation by Maxine Williams, Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female by Frances Beal, and The Black Movement and Women’s Liberation by Linda La Rue. The document addresses racism and sexism toward the goal of empowering Black women’s liberation. It demands the recognition of black women as full citizens.
“In attempting to analyze the situation of the black woman in America, one crashes abruptly into a solid wall of grave misconceptions, outright distortions of fact and defensive attitudes on the part of many. The system of capitalism (and its after birth ... racism) under which we all live, has attempted by many devious ways and means to destroy the humanity of all people, and particularly the humanity of black people. This has meant an outrageous assault on every black man, woman and child who reside in the United States.”