Activating the archive
After many years of silence, there is a renewed interest in Marta Lonzi’s name.
It was first heard in the 1970s amid the voices in the group Rivolta Femminile, at that time certainly overshadowed by the dazzling ideas of her sister Carla.
The appearance of the book L’architetto fuori in 1982 produced a new echo, intended as it was to raise questions among those involved in the creative process. The book was the first of those issued by the publisher Scritti di Rivolta Femminile to receive reviews. Like the titles previously published in the soon-to-become legendary Libretti Verdi series, it was influential essentially in feminist circles, but from here it reached a public in the professional discipline as well. It was read by architects, mostly abroad. The book made a definitive break with the Italian academic world, while abroad - especially in Berlin, France and Spain - it stirred interest and curiosity. She was then called to universities in those countries to hold design courses.
Marta was radically a designer: sensitive to the urban scale, refined in her interior designs. It would take longer for her value in the physical creation of spaces to be recognised and for her to be counted among the most inspiring Italian figures in the field of architecture of interiors.
Her patient work of regenerating Pietralata, an outer suburb of Rome, where she worked in the second half of the 1990s with the neighbourhood committees, hardly aroused comment beyond local news stories in the newspapers. Her solitary approach, made up of stubborn research and study, went decidedly against the tide. The publication of Autenticità e progetto (Jaca Book 2006), marking her return (after thirty years) to a teaching post in an Italian university, went almost unnoticed. Then there was silence, culminating in her death in 2008.
Almost twenty years later, in 2016, involved in the exhibition “Women in Italian Design” at the Design Museum of the Triennale di Milano, I thought of restoring this decidedly atypical figure to the attention of the public and scholars. Marta entered the exhibition with the lamp she designed with Carla Accardi.
That occasion led to a closer focus, contacts with her family and repeated site inspections in Chianti. One of these, with the President Marina Zancan, led to the fundamental decision to deposit Marta Lonzi’s archive with the Fondazione Elvira Badaracco.
In 2017, at the International Symposium at the Politecnico di Torino on Women’s Creativity since the Modern Movement (1918-2018). Toward a New Perception and Reception, I presented the first results of that research (“The Marta Lonzi Archive: Subjectivity in the Creative Process”). On that occasion, in another session, Marcella Tisi also spoke about Marta in her contribution “The Feminine Sensibility in the Project of the Place ‘Sustainable’”. A short time earlier, Chiara Belingardi, a young researcher in Rome, had published the e-book Città. Politiche dello spazio urbano (2016) for the Association of Philosophers (IAPh), a first approach to the two key texts: “Marta Lonzi, L’architeto fuori di sé (1982) and Autenticità e progetto (2006)”. Following the symposium in Turin, her name was included among the pioneers of Italian architecture in the Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture 1960-2015 (to be published by Bloomsbury).
In 2019, the archive had its public presentation in Milan at the Laboratorio Formentini per l’Editoria, in which we managed to involve people who had long known and appreciated her. Paolo Berdini, Maria Bottero and Marco Romanelli evoked the shared occasions, while Claudia Mattogno placed Marta in the European context of post-war women architects.
In 2021, at the height of the lockdown, as part of the V International Congress Architecture and Gender | ACTION. Feminisms and the spatialization of resistances, again an international public was able to follow my reconstruction of Marta Lonzi’s Berlin lecture in 1987 (“Berlin 1987. A Missed Confrontation”).
Her name had started to echo again. Since then, several researchers (all women!) have passed through the door of the Foundation to engage with Marta Lonzi’s archive: some from Milan, some from Rome or Bologna, but the first came from Turkey and the latest have been from France and Spain...
The archive is active again.
RP