Our Own Room Project based on the words of Virginia Woolf.
I would like to present you a project “Our Own Room” based on the words of Virginia Woolf in “A Room of One´s Own.” It consists in a two stages of development. The first one is completely digital and virtual. This stage forsees a viral dissemination strategy of distribution and will last six months. The second stage will crystallise the first one in a analogic ”real” exhibition.
Virginia Woolf´s book is based on the lectures that she gave in 1928 at two women’s universities in Cambridge. Her basic thesis was something so simple as difficult to achieve even today: a woman, in order to become a creator, needs her own room, that is, to be economically independent.
I would like to dedicate this project to all the women who have disappeared or been mistreated during this period of confinement, precisely because they do not have their own room.
Here, and from today, we want to widen the spectrum, to women artists from different disciplines. And also leave a space for anonymous women (or with their own name, if they wish) who reflect on the importance and the need of being independent.
The times of crisis due to the pandemic that we are suffering all over the world, have further accentuated this need. The only space for work and reflection has been reduced to four walls: the artists, regardless of the discipline they practice and the country they are based, have not only created in their homes or workshops, but have also exhibited their work from there in view of the impossibility of showing it elsewhere.
My aim is to invite women artists (here I am referring to the feeling of being a woman, not to the gender one is “born” with) to take Woolf’s words as a starting point, to reflect on them and then show their work from their own rooms, in the format they choose and in total freedom.
In order to support them and make them known in different geographies, the project aims to create and expand a networks and involve more and more people in the project, regardless of the country they are in. Each week will be devoted to one of the participating artists, starting the project in October 2020 (as this is the month in which Woolf’s book was first published) and closing on 8 March 2021, Working Women’s Day. The creation and promotion of the page will begin on September, the 28th and the first artist presentation will take place the week of October, the 5th. Once a month a woman writer or journalist will dedicate a few words of reflection to the situation of women and their own room.
