The relationship with artists
Already from the 1960s Marta had come into contact through her sister Carla Lonzi, an art critic, with the artists of the period, primarily Pinot Gallizio, Carla Accardi, Pietro Consagra, as well as Mario Nigro, Jannis Kounellis, Giulio Paolini and Luciano Fabro, establishing intense personal and collaborative relationships with some of them.
While in Gallizio’s case the relationship came to an early end with his sudden death (in 1964), her relations with Accardi and Consagra were much more extensive.
Carla Accardi shared with Marta the initial experience of the group Rivolta Femminile. The relationship continued after 1973 (the year when she left the group) on the basis of a shared creative urgency, although developed in different ways. An almost playful first result was the lamp Lume AL70, developed together for a competition occasion, then made for their respective homes, and finally included by Marta in the catalogue of Antithesis design editions. An important milestone was the renovation of the artist’s studio apartment, which Marta continued to work on until 1989. This period included Accardi’s participation in the IBA competition project in Berlin for the Lützowplatz (1987).
With Consagra, who “joined the family” around 1966, her relationship was complex. Initially impressed by “his freedom of expression, his autonomy of language, his direct way of relating to the object”, Marta saw Consagra, “after his intrusion into architecture” as “more similar to architects in the design process. While as a sculptor this analogy would have been more difficult for me” with all the pertinent reservations. But from their relationship came the projects developed (at several different times and on different sites) for a house on the island of Elba (1970-72), while their dialectical exchanges on creativity continued (1980).
Consagra, according to certain accounts, is credited with the cover sketch of L’architetto fuori di sé (1982).
Her intense association with artists would leave traces in the projects that Marta developed, featuring a distinctive expressive language and a great sensibility to the inclusion of works of art, starting from her manifesto home, the apartment in Piazzale Belle Arti in Rome.
“Her experience in that home was not theatrical but cinematographic; that is, Marta built a path that was created by the invention of the windows, which mixes the functions, it is a path in which... the works of art are like the freeze frame in cinema, the moment when the image stops, focuses in close-up on something and then starts again. A unique position in interior design” (M. Romanelli 2019)
