Seamless

The 9th TDM exhibition “W. Women in Italian Design” addresses several issues such as poor visibility and gender but also asks whether a female specificity exists in creative practice.

W. Women in Italian Design. Photo © Gianluca Di Ioia

What is the point of wondering now about women’s contribution to the design culture? There is a point, firstly in terms of a professional recognition which was hard fought for in the past and, in many cases, there has been late when not posthumous reparation.

Creativity confined to the “gender” spheres (e.g. textiles and ceramics) has enjoyed little visibility. Italy’s first female architecture graduates appeared in the late-1920s and were the proverbial “hen’s teeth” of the profession. Indeed, there has been little visibility at all. Even in examples of major achievements in the fields of architectural and graphic design, industrial design and mass production, the role played by the women in the team, professional partnership or company (often founded by the woman herself) has, with few exceptions, enjoyed less recognition, with similar difficulties being encountered in many Italian fields of cultural and scientific production. Far more complex, however, is the issue of whether there is a “female specificity” in creative practice, a question to which it is hard to give a univocal answer. Today, we know, at least in the West, that gender in its various permutations is one of the factors in play in issues of identity and power.

Both are being addressed by the latest TDM exhibition “W. Women in Italian Design”, curated by Silvana Annicchiarico, the museum’s director. The exhibition re-examines Italian design from a perspective of gender, crossed-referenced with the keys of the previous editions, to “define a new repertoire” that can, at last, explain the Great Absentee from so much 20th-century historiography – women’s substantial contribution to design. The Milanese institution performs a necessary act by raising public and media awareness of an issue so far addressed in Italy only by courageous trailblazers, university research or in niche exhibition proposals, unlike that seen in the art world.

Annicchiarico draws abundantly on arts and crafts, industrial design, self-production, illustration and the applied arts, and even on science to construct a lively and playful kaleidoscope in which works by pioneering women, unsung craftswomen and female artists sit alongside those by established names and new talents on the contemporary creative scene. This exhibition is an opportunity to enter Maria Montessori in the Empyrean of creativity, she who battled for a pedagogy founded on freedom and creativity; to rediscover or unearth eclectic or literally eccentric figures, in the sense of on the geographical margins, such as the Altara sisters who, in their native Sassari, developed remarkable forms of expression in graphic design, decoration and the applied arts. Lina Bo Bardi, the precocious protagonist of Italian post-war architecture (think of the MSA and her projects for Domus), found the space to fully express herself on a professional level in Brazil. Many of these have passed through the Triennale in one way or another over the years but now we see them in a different light.

Remember how Franca Helg struggled to gain recognition in her partnership with Albini, the same Helg whose early design works are classified under A for Antolini Helg (even a name is a conquest …). There were the ladies such as her and the bad girls who, in the 1970s, started questioning the patriarchal imprint that also conditioned creative production. They embarked on introspective research and produced their own archetypes, see Carla Accardi and Maria Lai; they questioned the creative process, see Marta Lonzi, distancing themselves – often ironically – from identification with the object, as too did Cinzia Ruggeri and many more. Scientists such as Cecilia Laschi and Barbara Mazzolai sought inspiration for their highly sophisticated robots in nature…

As we were saying, it is a kaleidoscope but becomes a slowly swelling river – featuring currents, vortexes, eddies, bends and springs – in Margherita Palli’s intriguing mise en scène which greets visitors with a spectacular monothematic cabinet of curiosities in which naturalia and artificialia are all entangled and the fulcrum is Carla Accardi’s Tenda, hovering between life and abstraction.

The metaphor of weaving has always accompanied women’s work and what if not a network, in today’s sense of the word, is the imaginary constellation traced on the wall of the exhibition room? The common thread linking very different protagonists is to be found in a choice of works that highlights “aspects of lightness, positivity and irony”. These are functional to a vision of design distinguished by a female component – as long prophesied by Andrea Branzi – regardless of the designer’s sex, which coincides with “a sudden and uncontrollable vision of the design”. This reading constructs what is certainly a compelling and pleasing path but as a definition is rather limiting for many designers; think of Gae Aulenti, recently celebrated with a special award by arcVision Prize, for architecture by women. She said once that if she really had to highlight a feature of her work as a woman it would perhaps be patience. Remember Zaha Hadid, who designed an Artemide lamp in the exhibition. Just a year ago, she said “Architecture is… like writing. This is the composition, and also you have to edit it, over and over again, so it looks seamless and effortless.” It could be said that out of that seamless comes an ancestral memory of “invisible points” but it takes so much research and tenacity. Let us imagine expanding the network beyond the confines of the exhibition. Milan currently offers much food for thought on the matter, only hinted at here. Presenting a work at the Polytechnic last autumn, Maria Giuseppina Grasso Cannizzo – who has a site-specific installation in the “Architecture as Art” exhibition at the HangarBicocca until the autumn – described herself as “an embroiderer”.

The painstaking task of installing and removing period tiles became a purely conceptual process in her hands, with iron-fast rules and reasoning, transforming decoration into internal landscape. The “anti-Penelopes weaving time and history” amassed by Marco Scotini in “The Unarchivable” exhibition at the Frigoriferi Milanesi also transform manual repetition into artistic process. As well as Accardi, they include Maria Lai who “sewed” the Sardinian landscape with rods and high-voltage cables. A thread served to construct her “The Challenge of Arachne”, now a small exhibition that overturns the hubris or arrogance of the woman who dares challenge the gods with her creations. Here in a withering drawing, Louise Bourgeois conveys the sense of that challenge in image form, replacing the arrogance with awareness. She drew her left hand, now gnarled with age, in tightly packed red-ink lines on music paper. Her ring finger is wearing a ring. Hand-action, body-time-reality, drawing-abstraction, colour-sensitivity, decoration-symbol… all on the Cartesian coordinates of music paper.

until 9 February 2017
W. Women in Italian Design
Triennale di Milano
viale Alemagna 6, Milan

Seamless

The 9th TDM exhibition “W. Women in Italian Design” addresses several issues such as poor visibility and gender but also asks whether a female specificity exists in creative practice.

Latest on Design

Latest on Domus