Ricerc@Sapienza

The women, for a long time, have worked in the field of artistic creation and scientific research, in almost total heteronomy. The
reflection proposes a survey on women’s ability to operate in partial independence and free thought through the design space, especially
the open space. One area in which women seem to find an aesthetic and ethical cohesion is related to the project of the modern and
contemporary city, in its collective places and more broadly, in the urban landscape. The sudden move towards the “outside” is what
characterizes writers, poetesses, architects, landscape architects, photographers, artists in a broad sense and even women scientists,
who were chosen to generate a feminine aesthetic in relation to the idea of open space.
This sharp and sudden movement can be tracked in the ‘live action’ unexpected and impetuous of which Roberto Calasso speaks and
which is brought to men and women by Nymphs in the form of madness-possession. Calasso refers to the true teaching of classical
knowledge that sudden gushes and with “The madness that comes from the Nymphs” he turns the foundations of Western culture: it
does not date back to the male Olympian gods but to the Nymphs, divinities of springs and trees.
Apollo and Dionysus, Calasso writes, would have usurped the merits and creativity of the Nymphs.
Reason for which must be re-modulated a mythology on the relationship between knowledge and nature linked to the women. The live
action and controversial always reappears: in the Renaissance we find it in the sudden movement of the hair of Botticelli’s Venus.
Today, for the authors proposed in this paper, the creative freedom appears to be coming right through the living gesture to go outside,
outdoors. Moving away from the house, even just in the garden, taking care of it, and from there discovering an external private and
public, it appears, for women, as a true form of rebellion. Exit out of the confines of a comfort zone, which is often determined by
others, was the live action of the two forerunners Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackeville West, who used nature as a metaphor for freedom.
The works here reread, belonging to different individuals and even far apart, are all linked by the metaphor of the open space, the
natural place and of the anthropized nature.
The list of scholars is very long, among them: R. Carson, R. Solnit, D. Scott Brown, T. Way and for the UE Muf Architects, P. Pera,
Resta and Bonesio, E. Morelli, Stephanié Buttier.