Zofia Krupa on Between the Landscape and Confinement

Ziyi-Jorrina Cheng on Female Regulation

In the book chapter “Female Regulation of the Healthy Home,” Annmarie Adams provides an insightful analysis into the multifaceted role of Victorian women in shaping domestic and public spheres through their contribution to household management and health standards. Adams interweaves the concept of domestic science with the cultural narrative of the era, showcasing women’s strategic […]

Zhishuang Liu on The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage

The discourse at the Rietberg Museum centered on the themes of restitution, ownership, and the significance of artwork as addressed in Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr’s influential paper, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics. The paper delves into the historical underpinnings of colonization, stressing the imperative to acknowledge and tackle […]

Yeshi Wang on Forms of Practice

I was very glad to discover this book on the contemporary history of Swiss architecture (1980-2000) a few years ago, which examines thoroughly the works that I’m familiar with and digs deeply into their historical and theoretical background. In the context of Women Writing Architecture, it is probably worth mentioning that the architectural scene at […]

Yeshi Wang on Die Architektin Maria Schwarz

‘Unsere Bauten waren unsere Kinder (Our buildings were our children),’ Maria Schwarz once said to Annette Krapp, the author of this book. Maria Schwarz’s wish of having a child was not realized. She dedicated instead all her love and passion to the common works of her and her husband Rudolf Schwarz. From concept to details, […]

Xingyu Bai on The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage

From the vast accumulation of thousands of objects of various anonymous identities, carefully locked behind the reflection of perfect glass panels, trapped by their shiny superficiality, I was brought in front of one of them by the British male voice of the audio guide. A sitting Bodhisattva in white porcelain, the étiquette says: “from China”. […]

Xinghe Guo on Life in Mexico

Xiaoyu Yang on Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest

Raindrops falling onto the pavement and bouncing off umbrellas. Sounds flood my ears; cars honking, the siren of an ambulance, the flickering of traffic lights and the voices of strangers as they pass us. My thoughts get muffled by the chaos of the crossing. As we stand in the rain, the concrete structure that is […]

WAI Think Tank on Women, Race & Class

Angela Davis provides with Women, Race & Class a deep, intersectional critique of feminism, tracing black women’s struggle from slavery to birth control and reproductive rights, to their relationship to suffrage and emancipation movements. Davis’s take is fundamental to articulate a holistic reading of feminism outside of wealthy and white women’s voices, and it sets […]

WAI Think Tank on Why Arguments Against Abolition Inevitably Fail

Angela Davis joined the online series Abolition for the People with an argument to dismantle the industrial carceral, and police system. Against the conservative stance of ‘reform’, Davis states that ‘racism is essentially systemic and structural rather than individual and attitudinal’ as repeatedly asserted by health care advocates and anti-police and anti-prison activists over many decades, […]

WAI Think Tank on The Wretched of the Screen

A collection of Hito Steyerl’s text, The Wretched of the Screen mixes humour and rigorous research critical takes on media, art, politics, cultural capital, and the infrastructures and relationships that build and maintain them.

WAI Think Tank on The Combahee River Collective Statement

A fundamental text to understand ‘identity politics’ that focuses on the black women’s oppression because ‘most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out’ from the black women’s identity, something that in the case of black women is a ‘particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at […]

WAI Think Tank on Teaching Community

Through historical and anecdotical accounts bell hooks outlines the possibility of ending racism, and understanding education as a tool for questioning and challenging interpersonal relationships, power dynamics, and ideology.

WAI Think Tank on Encancaranublado y otros cuentos de naufragio

Ana Lydia Vega narrates through fictional short stories a post-colonial imagination of racialized, oppressed, and mythological subjectivity in the Caribbean. The importance of Encancaranublado to the architectural imaginary lies, among many things, in the capacity to render real and fictional phenomena to address the complex ideological, political, and cultural forces shaping life in the Caribbean, and thus, […]

WAI Think Tank on Decolonization is not a Metaphor

Decolonization is not a Metaphor questions decolonization discourses without action, settler-moves to innocence, and problematizes how the ‘decolonial desires of white, non-white, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people’, can be entangled in ‘resettlement, reoccupation, and re-inhabitation that further settler colonialism.’ As decolonization can only start by relinquishing the occupied land, the authors argue that the metaphorization […]

WAI Think Tank on Black on Both Sides

C. Riley Snorton borrows the title from Yasiin Bey’s eponymous album to explore the central role that the racialization of the black subject plays in transness and transness plays in the construction of blackness. Rather than reading race as a secondary order of difference, which would presume that race is principally a biologized form (and […]

Victoria Balmer, James Flaus, Wen Guan, Sophie Kalwa on Why Are People Being So Nice?

This group chat is the result of a reading circle performance within the context of Studio Caruso at ETH Zurich during the spring semester of 2022. By drafting an overly exciting email, a chat about why we are „being so nice“ started. During the discussion, the exact same medium which was criticized by Rosler, was […]

Thomas Rohrer on We Should All Be Feminists

Thomas Rohrer on Testo Junkie

Thomas Rohrer on Lux Guyer

Taylor Wasserman on The Labor Problem

Kate Wagner writes an article following the accusations of architect David Adjaye for sexual assault and harassment, in July of this year. She provides a powerful and timely critique of the architectural industry, shedding light on the deeply rooted issues of misogyny, racial discrimination, and abuse of power within the profession of architecture. This passage […]

Tatjana Blaser on Was man von hier aus sehen kann

literary nimble, a touching story, it’s about children and Selma, I cried.

Tatjana Blaser on These are the Axes

100% truth

Tatjana Blaser on The Argonauts

this book is a must! i received it as a gift from my flatmate for my study of gender identity and found it to be the best guide for the birth of my child. no other book could prepare me for the birth as well and, above all, as honestly as this one.

Tatjana Blaser on Storia del nuovo cognome

33.3% good, 33.3% stupid, 100% addictive

Tatjana Blaser on Politik der Emotion

those are the basics! Absolute must.

Tatjana Blaser on Orlando

literary high, virginia woof shows without category and zeal, an ever changing gender identity. i highly recommend this text, it taught me a lot.

Tatjana Blaser on Ma mère rit

a very touching text. it is about the care work that the author does for her mother, who is at the end of her life.

Tatjana Blaser on Kapitalismus: Ein Gespräch über kritische Theorie

those are the basics! Absolute must.

Tatjana Blaser on GRM. Brainfuck.

a book that i read in the 8th month of pregnancy and actually made me even more afraid of the life that was to come for my child. it is different, it is understandable, it is annoying, but only because you actually know what it says, you just don’t actually want to know it. it […]

Tatjana Blaser on Glitch Feminism

short, clear, informative and above all important to have read.

Tatjana Blaser on Die gestundete Zeit

all the prose i’ve read by bachmann is heavy. it’s the same with the poems. it’s worth it. like orpheus, i play death on the strings of life, and in the beauty of this earth and your eyes that manage the sky, i only know how to say dark things.

Tatjana Blaser on Der Fall Franza

for anyone who has nightmares, this book is worse. with every fibre, these page-long sentences (i am not exaggerating at all) draw the reader into a dark, unhappy, very weighted spell. i find bachmann is gifted like no other, using incredible literary skill to bring feelings to life in me whose existences i was not […]

Tatjana Blaser on Anarchismus und Feminismus

feminism with examination of systems theory flaws.

Tatjana Blaser on Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

an other angry book from penny. i like angry people.

Tatjana Blaser on The Life of the Mind

exhausting but you can really feel how you get smarter from page to page. i recommend it to everyone who still likes an overview in between.

Stéphanie Dadour on The Handmaid’s Tale

The hardest part of the book is when we realise that we are not too far from this situation and that the book was based on historical material. To be read again, while drawing the spaces of the protagonist’s life, where the story takes place.