The Architect and the Housewife

This labzone borrows its title from an artist’s book published in 1999 by Frances Stark, a meditation on how the spaces of the studio and of domestic life intersect and merge, in her own practice and that of others. After visiting the studios / apartments of Carol Rama and Carlo Mollino in Turin last year, this year I want to continue this exploration of how, as artists, we interact with, modify and build the interiors in which we live and work. Nothing is more gendered than the division between public and private, and as artists we constantly negotiate and redraw that frontier.
Since at least the modern period artists have been creating their own spaces and architectures, whether it in a quest for a total work of art, aiming to disrupt the boundary between art and everyday life, or trying to foster ways of living outside of traditional gender rules and patriarchal notions of the family and the distinctions they entail between public and private and work and leisure. Unsurprisingly many of these attempts have been the work of female or queer artists, and during the labzone I want to offer a way of working and reading that is explicitly informed by feminist art history and genealogies. We will spend time together trying to understand how these issues shape our own lives and artistic practices, occasionally inviting guests to join us.
During the first semester we will look at artists who have made their living spaces and studios the matter of their work itself. Together, we will read texts / watch films about these artists as well as writers such as Maggie Nelson, Marguerite Duras or Beatriz Colomina on the gendering of space and architecture. In the second semester we visit Nike de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden in the South of Tuscany, the phantasmagorical sculpture park that was also her home for the last twenty years of her life.

An non exhaustive reading / art work list :

-Marguerite Duras, La vie matérielle
-Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts and Like Love
-Beatriz Colomina ed., Sexuality and Space
-Kirsty Bell, The Artist’s House, from Workplace to Artwork
-Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution
-Frances Stark, The Architect and the Housewife and Collected Writings 1993-2003 Casa Balla, Giacomo Balla and Luce and Elica Balla, Rome
-Andrea Zittel, AZ East and AZ West, Brooklyn and Joshua Tree Marc Camille Chaimowicz, apartment, London
-Niki de Saint Phalle, Jardin des Tarots, Capalbio, Grosseto, Italy Carlo Mollino, Casa Mollino, Turin
-Carol Rama, Casa Museo Carol Rama, Turin