Revealing Work. Interrogating Artifacts to (Re)View Histories of Feminist Architectural Practice

Abstract

Contemporary investigations of feminist practices in architecture from the near past rely upon scant and therefore precious sources. Many unique physical artifacts are lying, unarchived, in box files and plan chests or fading on bookshelves, and their meanings and associations remain caught in the era in which they were made. We have selected artifacts from 1970s and 80s feminist spatial practice in London that we, with others, were instrumental in creating, to re-examine, and to invite further commentaries. Through contextualizing them in their period–and interrogating through our own memories–we became particularly concerned to reappraise what counts as work; the work of actual doing; the work of finding ways to generate social change; the experiences of that work as embodied; and the work that the artifact itself does–how, through what happens to it in the world, it exceeds or alters what had been intended.

Keywords:

• feminism
• feminist architecture
• artifacts
• interpretation
• work
• materiality

Notes

1 For example, Neil MacGregor, “A History of the World in 100 Objects,” BBC Radio 4 (2010–12), https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nrtd2 (accessed October 31, 2016).

2 Adrian Forty and Susanne Kuchler, eds., The Art of Forgetting (London: Routledge, 2001).

3 For more, see Julia Dwyer and Anne Thorne, “Evaluating Matrix: Notes from Inside the Collective,” in Altering Practices: Feminist Politics and Poetics of Space, ed. Doina Petrescu (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 39–56.

4 For the collection of feminist objects made for the new National Museum of Australia in 2009, see Alison Bartlett and Margaret Henderson, “What is a Feminist Object? Feminist Material Culture and the Making of the Activist Object,” Journal of Australian Studies 40, no. 2 (2016): 156–71.

5 Ibid., 157.

6 Alison Bartlett and Margaret Henderson, “Feminism and the Museum in Australia: An Introduction,” Journal of Australian Studies 40, no. 2 (2016): 136.

7 Bartlett and Henderson, “What is a Feminist Object?,” 157.

8 Joan Sangster, “Telling Our Stories: Feminist Debates and the Use of Oral History,” Women’s History Review 3, no. 1 (1994): 6.

9 Naomi Stead and Cristina Garduño Freeman, “Architecture and ‘The Act of Receiving, or the Fact of Being Received’: Introduction to a Special Issue on Reception,” Architectural Theory Review 18, no. 3 (2013): 268.

10 Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

11 Queer theorists and disability studies scholars have also been exploring different ways of thinking about time; they refuse to disentangle it from different kinds of bodies in space. For example; “Crip time is flex time not just expanded but exploded; it requires reimagining our notions of what can and should happen in time, or recognizing how expectations of ‘how long things take’ are based on very particular minds and bodies. […] Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds”; Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 27.

12 “Birmingham Film and Video Workshop,” undated conference paper, https://media.bufvc.ac.uk/c4 pp/extras/conferences_papers/papers_pdf/SBHG_Franklin.pdf (accessed October 31, 2016).

13 Katie Lloyd Thomas, Material Matters: Architecture and Material Practice (London: Routledge, 2007).

14 Ibid., 2.

15 Ibid., 5.

16 Bartlett and Henderson, “Feminism and the Museum in Australia,” 136.

17 Sarah Wigglesworth, and Jeremy Till, The Everyday and Architecture (Architectural Design, Vol. 68) (London: Academy Press, 1998), 7–8.