La Flâneuse
Nelly Agassi and Maya RavivCurated by: Architect Sabrina Cegla
Liebling Haus Tel Aviv
2021
In the third Project Room exhibition artist Nelly Agassi and animator Maya Raviv address the question “What is the White City?” via la Flâneuse – a female figure who wanders around the White City, assuming and abstracting its buildings as if they were dresses. La Flâneuse seeks to decipher the changing city as if it were a fabric, wishing to reappropriate it through means considered feminine. Agassi and Raviv offer a new relationship between la Flâneuse and the city by evoking forgotten visions, activities and the female presence in Tel Aviv’s urban space. La Flâneuse is also an architect who shapes and dismantles her environs. Her figure comes forth in a series of collages made from the historical architecture plans of three public buildings designed in the 1930s and 40s by women, for the women of the city, buildings whose construction was initiated by women’s organizations. La Flâneuse is therefore strolling in a very familiar Tel Aviv urbanity. Her calm demeanor is in stark contrast to the constant rhythm of the city, then as now, from the 1930s with the construction of the physical space now known as the White City, and our current times, which are characterized by high towers, building renewal plans, conservation and rapid urban development. La Flâneuse bears witness to these processes of change, growth, decay; the emptying and neglect of the vision from which the city emerged. Fabric becomes the soft building material that bridges between the traditional female role in the domestic sphere to the urban, public role, as can be seen in Agassi’s work Neither Velvet nor Silk. Here the fabric breaks through the exhibition space, formerly an apartment living room, floods the apartment balcony before joining the historical exhibition on the White City displayed in the adjacent rooms. In so doing it represents the move of women architects from planning the domestic space, traditionally perceived as feminine, into the public space and the manifestation of these domestic skills on an urban scale. In other works the architectural plans and elements become patterns of dresses in Agassi’s collages or are translated back into fabric as can be seen in Raviv’s work Soft Plan (Roof), in which the paper plans and the hard structure have become a soft felt object recalling traditional female craft. These transitions echo discourse about the entry of women into the architecture profession in Europe in the early 20th century, which included men deliberating over women’s capacity the physical attributes required of the woman architect as also her moral decency. For example, women desiring to study architecture at the Bauhaus school, active in Germany in 1919-1933, were encouraged instead to study at the school’s departments of weaving, pottery and book binding, all considered typically feminine pursuits.
Raviv and Agassi reflect on the connection between the female body, architecture and the city, between cultural conventions and dreams, and how the framework for the activities of these early 20th century women – the domestic space – was extended and became manifested in institutions meant to support women in performing their traditional roles – and the materiality associated with them. The artists act from within this context and expand it, adding their biographies to the story of the city and its inhabitants.
Through this personal examination and interpretation of three public buildings from the 1930s and 40s, Raviv and Agassi bring forth the stories and actions of women in the urban space of the White City, shed light on the passage of women planners from the private “soft” realm into the “masculine” public space, and the transformation of the domestic women-associated everyday sphere into a key object of modern planning. Agassi and Raviv were both inspired by the publication of Building a New Land: Women Architects and Women’s Organizations in Mandatory Palestine (2020,Hebrew) by the architectural historian Sigal Davidi
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