A Woman’s Work explores the roles, influence and visibility of contemporary female practitioners. It has the form of a symposium that will take place 18 January in the frame of the exhibition “Against Invisibility”, currently on display at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Dresden. The symposium is structured in three parts: Advocates of History, Enablers of Visibility and Dismantlers of Existing Conditions. The gathering aims to bring women in and around design, art and architecture to the fore, creating the conditions for their visibility to become a permanent condition.

Curators Vera Sacchetti and Matylda Krzykowski are the founders of Foreign Legion, a globally active curatorial initiative. Their essay A Woman’s Work, or, steps towards the yin revolution – that we hereby publish – is part of the exhibition catalogue.

“Is a yin utopia a contradiction in terms, since all the familiar utopias rely on control to make them work, and yin does not control? Yet it is a great power. How does it work? I can only guess. My guess is that the kind of thinking we are, at last, beginning to do about how to change the goals of human domination and unlimited growth to those of human adaptability and longterm survival is a shift from yang to yin, and so involves acceptance of impermanence and imperfection, a patience with uncertainty and the makeshift, a friendship with water, darkness,
and the earth.” – Ursula K. Le Guin [1]

For female designers in the early 21st century, the last two decades have brought attention, and with attention, visibility and value. The renewed interest in the role of women in design contributes to make amends with one of the many lacking aspects in the discipline’s history, the systematic erasure of women’s presences. It is an occasion to celebrate, even if, as critic Alexandra Lange has recently put it, “women have always been there—as recent histories have shown them to have been in computing, the sciences, and a host of other male-dominated
fields—but we have overlooked their contributions.”[2]

Nevertheless, this newfound place under the spotlight should be less a cause for celebration than an opportunity to bring about systemic, and much needed change that has the power to significantly affect the design world and system — with positive consequences that will benefit not only women, but all those who fight for visibility and equality, and ultimately the discipline itself.

The recognition of the role of women in the history of design opens the door to other kinds of realizations, such as a recognition of the design discipline’s fundamentally collaborative nature, and of the many, complex relationships that exist behind the making of a designed object, be it analogue or digital, material or immaterial. 

With these realizations comes also the understanding that design is not a discipline of big names and heroes — much like design history has made us believe for the better part of the last two centuries — but a discipline where many hands work together, weaving non-linear processes and complex stories. It is in bringing about this understanding that the analogy of the yin-yang symbol can become useful. “In the yang-yin symbol,” writes seminal author Ursula K. Le Guin, “each half contains within it a portion of the other, signifying their complete interdependence and continual intermutability.”[3]

For Le Guin, the characteristics of Yang — “male, bright, dry, hard, active, penetrating” — and Yin — “female, dark, wet, easy, receptive” — shouldn’t be considered as separate or subordinate to one another. Instead, they are complementary and equal. “Neither can exist alone,” she concludes, “and each is always in process of becoming the other.”[4]

As women step into the spotlight of design history, and are subjected to new analysis and renewed attention, so does the mostly “yang” model of design come under scrutiny, and can be re-evaluated in all its messiness, incompleteness, and thorniness. In this process, the discipline itself, alongside its past, present and future, can allow itself to become deeply transformed. This how the yin revolution starts.

No longer need women to navigate the design profession without role models to look up to and be inspired by. No longer have women to conform to any predefined career orientation, designing their paths in whichever way they deem best. And because, in recent years more than ever, women in design can find inspiring examples all around them, the practitioner of today should not have to quiet down their voice, hush away their presence, hide their influence.

And yet, it is this reclaiming that is the biggest challenge, one that must take most of our attention right now: finding and using our own voices in design, loud and clear.

To say things such as:
Yes, grant me that opportunity.
Yes, I want access to that platform.
Yes, give me that job (and pay me as much as you would a man).
Yes, represent and sell my work (for the same price as you will sell a work made by a man).
Yes, this is obvious, necessary, and the only way I will work for you, with you, alongside you.

Speaking loud and clear, unafraid and unabashedly, seems like the obvious thing to do, and a survey of contemporary female practitioners will find a minority that acts and moves in the world of design exactly like that: unafraid and unabashedly. Nevertheless, look beyond this minute number and you will find that reclaiming a voice is still a very difficult thing for women in design to do.

This difficulty is mostly related to the structures and frameworks within which we operate in the design world. To this day, women in design have been mostly educated by men (in classes that at present count roughly half of women students); hired by men; worked for men; and their work has been valued (and exhibited, or not) by men. “Education plays a major role in helping us all accept different ways of organizing relations and power in institutions, universities, boards, and councils,” writes curator and educator Chus Martínez in a recent article.[5]

Martínez goes on to say that if women cannot change how they are perceived by others, professional opportunities alone cannot be enough. “We need to name the dangers women face,” she concludes, “but we must also be flexible enough to play with the entrenched structures long enough to find ways of working together that are more equitable. By adopting preceding models, we are adopting their symbolic values as well.” 

The creation of discursive environments where change can be enacted, tested out, and then replicated and amplified, can only happen if and when women in design start using their voices, loud and clear in their polyphonic embrace. And finding strength in numbers, they can finally advocate for real equality, which, Martínez reminds us, “calls for pushing existing conditions to the limit,”[6] in order to ultimately dismantle them.

Dismantling the conditions of the present is fundamental for the visibility of women in design to become permanent. Today, even if invisibility seems far at bay, there is a great risk that the female practitioner will quickly become assimilated by the system and become a commodity, as just another trend, a temporary obsession of markets, collections, museums and the media. And, after all design made by women is sold, exhibited, commissioned and exchanged by inflated sums of money, it will be discarded in a few years for something else, something new, something fresher.

Women could return to their invisible condition and their struggle for a voice, for a place, for agency, will have to start again. It is in the fearless dismantling of the present and its entanglements that the great transformation ushered by the yin revolution can happen, and become a permanent condition.      

What does the yin revolution bring with it? We do not know. But we know it is thorny, messy, complex, and collaborative. And it will transform us all.

Preview image: Portrait of Gertrud Kleinhempel, © Historisches Museum Bielefeld, within the exhibition "Against Invisibility"