Cosmowomen, curated by the Spanish architect Izaskun Chinchilla, features the projects of 65 female architects (more than 20 different nationalities) who have studied at the Bartlett School of Architecture in the last ten years. They have been mentored by 22 tutors, 50% of them women, all of them with a great variety of cultural and professional origins.

The full incorporation of women into the architecture sector can be seen as a strategic opportunity. If we give women the right not only to work, with equivalent salaries and decision-making authority, but to use their distinctive social, cultural, biological experience and distinctive historical heritage, aren’t the terms more likely to change? those that architecture crises are happening? This exhibition seeks to answer affirmatively to that question. The basic hypothesis is that the full incorporation of women into the professional and academic field of architecture would generate new spaces for thought and attention on the part of professionals or would consolidate and expand existing ones, and that it would also intensify the relationships between these ‚places of thought ‚, producing a kind of constellation.

Practical info

„Cosmowomen. Places as Constellations“
June 21 – October 10, 2021
Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea
viale delle Belle Arti, 131, Roma
Italy

The exhibition, that was meant to open back in June 2020, inhabits the space of the Salone Centrale with three complex and monumental structures made of sustainable materials. The structures are inspired by three armillary spheres, reduced models of the cosmos seen from the terrestrial perspective, used as astronomical instruments in antiquity and the Middle Ages to determine the position of celestial bodies.

The three monumental spheres – the Gynaeceum, the Onsen and the Parliament – represent three places of coexistence that have played an important role in the construction of the common culture of women, while also representing places of exclusion or segregation. Through those spheres, the exhibition reflects on the relationship that the sexed bodies create with, respectively, the intimate, natural and public space.

Based on these symbolic places and by developing multiple sub-spheres, the new generations of female architects present in the show the alternative models of designing as well as relating to space, other human beings and the planet, putting together some reflections on forms of living, co-living and collaboration.

The fundamental hypothesis of the exhibition is that the full integration of women in the professional and academic field of architecture would generate new „places of reflection,“ or consolidate and expand the existing ones, by ultimately intensifying the relationships between those places and by creating a sort of a constellation.

Through a rich selection of 75 projects and 283 graphic images and drawings, the exhibition presents the work of 63 women architects from over 20 countries who come from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London.

A webseries that will explore the exhibition, the forthcoming catalog and other collateral activities, including the Cosmoschool, will appear On What’s on?, the blog of the Galleria Nazionale, with a new chapter coming out every week until the opening date.

Cosmowomen. Places as Constellations has been created with the support of the CDP (Cassa Depositi e Prestiti) and in partnership with Bartlett School of Architecture.