Authenticity and Design

The Marta Lonzi Archive

Curated by:
Raffaella Poletti

Speakers:

Paolo Berdini; Maria Bottero; Claudia Mattogno; Marco Romanelli

What was women’s contribution to design culture in the 20th century? In terms of professional recognition, it has most often received a kind of belated, if not posthumous, acknowledgment. This is the case for Marta Lonzi (1938-2008), architect and wholly original exponent of Italian feminism. Marta Lonzi participated from the very beginning with her sister Carla—a leading figure of feminism in Italy, art critic and discoverer of the artistic avant-garde of the 1960s—in the founding of Rivolta femminile (Rome 1970) and the subsequent creation of the publishing house of the same name in Milan in 1971. A passionate essayist and activist publisher, she was a designer sensitive to urban scale, refined in interiors. An advocate of a creative process that is non-violent toward the pre-existing, she proposed an architecture based on awareness and relationships: a position that in many ways anticipated contemporary lines of research on sustainability.
In a dense journey of reflections and practices that profoundly involve both the existential and professional dimensions, she highlights how it is not objectivity, but authenticity that validates the proposition developed by the designer: “This value undermines… every expedient of sublimated relationship with the object because it requires a real relationship with the object but first of all a real relationship with oneself.”
“Today, the architect is stuck at a stage in which he is one with what he elaborates. Having allowed the subjective, therefore conscious, relationship between himself and the object to decay, he resides immanent in the design that he presents in objective terms, illusorily believing them to be truthful. From this tautological spiral of designing comes the decay of the process and, therefore, of the object: no longer architecture, but cubic volume; no longer a city on a human scale, but periphery, that is, agglomerations devoid of soul; no longer integrity of the territory, but fracture” (Authenticity and Design, 2006).
Authenticity, therefore: a key word in the feminist lexicon that Marta, more than thirty-five years after the beginning of the exploration of consciousness-raising, uses as a litmus test to reread the history of architecture in search of ethical characteristics. But this is an expansive process from the subject to its practices that now concern the entire social body.
Her archive has been deposited since 2017 at the Fondazione Elvira Badaracco which, on the occasion of its opening for consultation, exhibits a selection of materials that testify to its richness and interest.