Feminisms and the spacialization of resistances: keeping the fight alive

Abstract

Since the beginning of the first decade of the 21st century, an interest about studies in feminism and architecture was recaptured by some scholars in the Anglo-Saxon context influencing new generations to come. This reviving of women’s studies in architecture had a more difficult path in other latitudes that lacked academic references in different languages, but it would soon blow up starting from the Mediterranean region. In 2014, the first international congress was organized in Seville, Spain, by scholar Nuria Alvarez Lombardero, around architectural practice. This initiative called Arquitectas: redefining the practice started with a small support from the University of Seville, Spain. Still, it courageously caught the attention of different researchers worldwide with similar concerns. The call for papers was answered by more than fifty proposals of all kinds that voiced a need to expose a resistance to obscurantism concerning the subject. Fourteen articles were selected and structured following the major themes: places of exclusion, rewriting the history of architecture, worldwide practices, and new forms of practice. Supporting these reflections, five women architects were invited as guest speakers to share their positions and experiences around the subject of practice, allowing a deeper conversation transcripted in the book Arquitectas: redefiniendo la práctica presented at the XIII Spanish Bienal of Architecture and Urbanism (Alvarez Lombardero, N. 2015). Gratifyingly, the congress became the inception of an extensive network of researchers and scholars that still operates today with more than 1,000 people connected worldwide.