Keynote lectures
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Carmo Valente, the gesamtkunstwerk in the feminine
Architecture, Art and Design
Ana Tostões
Carmo Valente (Portugal, 1930-2011) is one of the cases of exclusion of women from history who remains as one of the invisible creators that must be introduced in the 20th architectural history and theory. She devoted her life to an exciting career that involved different scales of intervention, from the house to the city. From 1968 onwards, she was the leader of the interior design section in the atelier of Francisco Conceição Silva (1922-1975), where she crafted numerous pieces of furniture and everyday objects. Mostly important, she championed the concept of a total work of art, bringing coherence and virtuosity into the environments. During the 1970s, her work in the Balaia and Tróia complexes earned her some recognition among scholars. Yet, to this day, comprehensive research has not been undertaken to unveil the dedicated contributions of this female architect. It is time to re-evaluate and rewrite history.
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How many women designers and architects had one-person exhibition last year in museums?
Bárbara Coutinho
Recalling one of the posters of Guerrilla Girls in 1985 (“How Many Women Artists Had One-Person Exhibitions In NYC Art Museums Last Year?”), this lecture intends to debate how should museums showcase the role of female creativity when there is often a lack of sources and materials? How can they effectively demonstrate the contributions of women to the processes of training, production, reflection, and exhibition of modern design, especially given that they often emphasize their involvement in collaborative, participatory and multidisciplinary work rather than promoting their individual careers? This lecture focuses on the perspective of a historian, researcher, and curator in debating this issue, using the recent history of Portugal since the mid-1960s as an example, a period during which design began to gain autonomy. To this end, the thoughts and work of women from different generations who developed their design practices with clear pedagogical, institutional, or associative orientations are analysed.
Modern interior architects in Turkey: a focus on women
Deniz Hasirci
in collaboration with Zeynep Tuna Ultav (Yasar University), Melis Ornekoglu Selcuk (Ghent University), Deniz Avci Hosanli (Izmir University of Economics)
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The aim of the studies is to reveal the women designers who have made important breakthroughs in the fields of furniture design and interior architecture in Turkey through the oral history method. The aim of this study, which is a continuation of a previous series of focused on modern design and designers in Turkey, is on the female, and to investigate prominent women figures in Turkish modern interior architecture, highlighting their often-muted contributions to the field.
Maria Keil (1914-2012): the polyphonic work of a pioneering designer in Portugal
Helena Souto
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Maria Keil studied painting at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts. She bequeathed a vast and multifaceted work which, while it started with painting, quickly took on other art forms, highlighting her pioneering role in graphics and advertising design, but also illustration, furniture, scenography and costume design, tapestry and more particularly tile design, where she left several urban interventions in Lisbon that are a contemporary heritage of the capital’s tile legacy. Maria Keil has constantly rejected the passé arts system, crossing languages, forms and techniques which intersect the multiple artistic universes that she developed. As a starting point for our presentation, the challenge of display her furniture and tiling work in 1955, an exhibition that she carried out under her own name, defying a very conservative era of dictatorship in Portugal.
Maria Keil, study for tile mural Sea, 1956-1958, in Avenida Infante Santo, Lisboa. Collection of the Museu Nacional do Azulejo - MNAz © Photo MNAz/DGPC.
Lina Bo Bardi Furniture:
Some of her diverse nuances
Marta Peixoto
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Orthogonal geometry and thick slabs of glued hardwood pieces distinguish the chairs for the theatre of SESC Pompéia, in São Paulo, the wealthiest city in Brazil. Elementary geometry and solid wood characterize the Girafa chair and the Frei Egydio bench, both designed for two buildings in Salvador, in North-east Brazil, the country’s most impoverished region. Those pieces designed by Lina Bo Bardi have no padding, and their production was semi-artisanal. She justified the obvious discomfort as resistance against the consumer society and associated it to the simplicity and ingenuity of the North-eastern inhabitant. This character was the human type best personifying the country in Lina’s opinion. It is known that Lina Bo Bardi’s designs promote the exuberant conviviality between Modernity and local tradition. The above-mentioned analysis is the starting point for a discussion of cultural stereotypes and the complexities and contradictions involved in their use as design and marketing arguments in her work.
Women in Architecture and History. Critical reflection on Portuguese work in progress
Patrícia Santos Pedrosa
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Only since the 2010s have women architects started to have a place as subjects in the History of Portuguese Architecture; it is essential to understand the path and strategies this historical research has taken so that women have a full right to exist in architectural practices and their history. Thinking critically about the History of Portuguese Architecture is as important as taking a self-reflexive look at the emerging History of Women in Architecture.
Critical concepts and methodologies of feminist historiography genealogy are fundamental to guaranteeing that we can draw a new history with new significance. The critical feminist dimension is essential to ensure that past mistakes, sustained by diverse hierarchies and oppressions, are not repeated. Or, when they do happen, they are identified, analysed, and, through self-critical processes, can contribute to better conceptual and methodological adjustment in the future. This work proposes a walkthrough of the last years of research and how mapping decisions, research and choices should always be self-questioned.
Maria José Estanco. In Judith Maggiolly. «Mulheres que trabalham. A primeira arquitecta». Modas & Bordados, 2 Mar 1937, n. 1304, p. 5.
A female vision on modernist interior architecture, a future visionary legacy, a political x-ray
Paula Torgal
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A careful reflection is proposed on the contributions of women in modernist interior architecture and their impact on the political sphere, allowing us now, “x-ray” the innovative capacity of their interventions.
This political perspective may have contributed to the transformation of interior architecture and society as a whole. To imagine this "political x-ray in the feminine" means to consider how modernist women architects questioned patriarchal structures and challenged inequality.
In this way, we could understand that the feminine perspective of modernist architecture assumes a visionary character, going beyond mere intervention and becoming a means of expression and protest for political and social issues, through its architecture.
This vision of modernist architecture from a feminine perspective is a visionary legacy for the future. It tells us that the work of these women is not only in the past, but firmly rooted in a hopeful and egalitarian future. Their contribution transcends the field of architecture and influences society at different levels.
Making women designers Googleable.
The methodology behind the Flanders Architecture Institute Wiki Women Design Project
Zsuzsanna Böröcz
The Wiki Women Design Project was a two-year initiative by the Flanders Architecture Institute started in October 2020 through a broad network with Docomomo Belgium as one of the partners. The project set a milestone by bringing women designers out of the shadows and demonstrating their influence on Belgium’s design heritage. With the tagline “renovation memoriae”, the project wanted to break the vicious circle of invisibility and contribute to a more inclusive history through the use of Wikipedia. The result is that today there are already 7.5% more Wikipedia articles about women designers, and the effect continues. Diving into a wide range os issues, this lecture wishes to showcase the methodology of the Wiki Women Design Project as a best practice example which could be replicated in other countries.
