Materiale divulgativo, Oggetto 18

Marta Lonzi The architect at variance with himself Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1982 The theoretical premise that underlies the whole creative process, whether directed towards the design of a city, architecture or an object, is the awareness that objective truth depends on a subject who cannot be at all objective in as much as he is himself the product of his own creative transformation and intentionality. Consequently, the designer as subject can no longer develop his project in terms of a totalizing rationality. In order to be credible, therefore, the designer as subject must declare himself: render explicit his bias, lay bare his own creative process, the motivations behind his own particular truth. Because that truth is no longer the truth; it no longer has a reason to be objective, its own raison d'être is completely identified with that of the subject. Consequently, it is no longer objectivity that is the yardstick of a designer's creative proposition but authenticity, that is the assumption on the part of the designer as subject of responsibility for the proposition. The focus thus shifts from the object to the subject in an innovatory overturning of the creative process: no longer a dialogue of objects but of consciousnesses, of individual creative subjects. This premise unhinges all possibility of a sublimated relationship with the object because authenticity implies a real relationship with the object but above all a real relationship with oneself. The absolute subject becomes a mortal. It is to this life/death drama that we can trace the difference in approach of men and women to their relationship with objects. It is a fact that for women investing objects with their identity is not a vital impulse whereas for men it is both a vital impulse and the sublime path to redeeming themselves from their own condition as men because the object embodies the immortality of the father, continuity after death. For women this continuity is experienced through motherhood. In fact, the object is to the father what the daughter or son is to the mother. But unlike the object, the daughter or son establish a real relationship with the mother in every sense. As I wrote: "Expecting a child and giving birth to it are experiences that leave their mark on one's indidivuality like no other adventure on earth". It is all in the first person; it is a total disruption.