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  CURRENT EXHIBITIONS (BARCELONA)

BARCELONA   

27, 28, 29 / April / 2005

BUILDING IN PARITY

Building in parity is an initiative of Andalusia Women Institute in the frame of “Building the future: an opportunity for women´s job” project, which belongs to an Equal program financed by the European Community.

As Teresa Jiménez, the Andalusia Women Institute manageress, says:

“Building in Parity is to move -in a professional way- all women richness to the world of construction; It is to understand that women´ s qualities and knowledge are so necessary. It is to eliminate stereotypes and to value the quality of well done work.

It is to accept and respect differences. It is to give all the same opportunities in life and work. It is to assume – both women and society- their own identity, as the  best way for integration.

It is to find a new social model to balance labour, familiar an personal life, distributing equitably responsibilities, rights and duties, spaces and times, making easier the egalitarian share of times. It is understanding construction as  the expression of a feeling full of love to live, where we all can fit.

Women and men need an egalitarian, flexible and multifunctional city, a city of places. Places to  live and to participate together. Places designed  to accept us, to integrate us and to give voice to all citizenship.”


The exhibition develops in three emotional journeys that are related with three different spaces:

-A Journey through MEMORY: Women Pioneers. This journey talks to us about women genealogy within the European construction area. And talks to us too about the history never written in ordinary books (the presence of absence), about  these women’s dreams.  Women who started from nothing, taking part in vanguard movements and in a new way of understanding life; through their writings, their drawings, their built spaces, their fortress, their boldness and their generosity.

-A journey through women´ s work: Women constructors.  It is divided in four fundamental elements and one implied element:
    Air: Women who build in the air.
    Earth: Women who build in touch with earth.
    Fire: Women who build so the fire burns.
    Water: Women who build so the water flows.
    The fifth element:  women contribution. 

-A journey through inhabitated spaces: designed with "gender perspective". It is divided in ONE EXPLICATIVE PANNEL and four others with pictures and project descriptions of spaces built by women architects, and another traditional or actual spaces in architecture. What are spaces built with "gender perspective"? Recipe of "gender mainstreaming": Ingredients: FLEXIBILITY / MOBILITY / SECURITY / EQUALITY.

These emotional journeys can be visited  in different ways and with different rhythms and  interests, immerse in a topological space, created by textile tulle hanging by the ceiling. So like in a ritual, one experiments unreal or magic sensations, like being inside a forest, within nature…which makes easier to understand the Exhibition content.

It is the unconsciousness, that what is hidden, maternal life, the infinite, that what contacts us with the essential of life: the emotional world.

Exhibition responsible: Cristina García -Rosales, WOMEN WHO BUILD Architect
Sponsorship: Andalusia Institute for Women & Architecture School of Barcelona
Place: Architecture School of Barcelona Hall
Dates: 25 - 29 April

BUILDING FROM THE INSIDE

“Building from the inside” brings together architectural works designed by several generations of women architects or teams where women played a significant role. They all belong to three different countries of the Mediterranean Sea shores.

This travelling exhibition was created as an imaginative, participative and full of life activity that adds new projects in each of the towns or country it visits.

Initially, it began its journey with thirty-five architectural works carried out in Spain. These works were selected through an open call to all Spanish women architects. The first places where it was shown were: the University of Alcalá de Henares, Madrid (May 1999); the Ministry of Public Work's Room, Madrid (April-May 2000); San Telmo Provincial Museum, Town Council of San Sebastian (April 2001) and San Prudencio Room, Town Council of Vitoria-Gasteiz (September 2001).

In December 2002 it opened within the Exhibition Hall of Order of Architects & Engineers of Beirut (Lebanon) adding 5 new works of Spanish women architects as well as 7 of Lebanese. In May 2003 it was presented in Rome (Italy) in the Acquario Romano (Casa dell´Archittetura) with 5 new works of Italian women.    

Now in Barcelona, and because the dimensions of the Exhibition Hall, it has been necessary to reduce it contains, obliging us to make a difficult selection of 22 works in which we have tried to reflect specially the social and authentic function of Architecture, which is to build spaces with a human scale, spaces where one can live the day-a-day life, spaces showing they have been “built from the inside”.

WOMEN WHO BUILD" IN THE MEDITERRANEAN

We think it very necessary to lay down networks between similar viewpoints, to look for what joins us together and not what separates us. This is the reason why we think its new stop in Barcelona harbour will contribute to create a launch platform of a cultural network of women architects linked to the creation and management of spaces, in such a way that the echo of a new voice will start to be heard from all Mediterranean shores.

Exhibition responsibles: Cristina García-Rosales & Ana Estirado Gorría, WOMEN WHO BUILD Architects
Sponsorship: Ministry of Public Works of Spain, Directorate General for Housing, Architecture and Town Planning and Cervantes Institute.
Place: Francesca Bonnemaison Centre for Women (Sant Pere Mes Baix 7, Barcelona), from 7th March to 29th of April
From Monday to Friday (9am to 22 pm) Saturdays (from 10am to 14 pm)

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