For Women Writing Architecture, Silvia Federici’s book, Caliban and the Witch, is a central and influential text. Not bound by academic methodology and written with ideological energy it is easy to read without being explicitly emotional. Federici challenges and questions the location of women in history as hidden and secondary through her examination of one of the mechanisms for dispersing and sublimating women’s labour in the service of early capitalism and making it an invisible generator of capital. This mechanism is the invention of witches and their persecution, of course, which enables the control of women’s behaviour through a manifest moral structure. The second text connected to this annotations is a chapter in her later book, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women, which is called On the Meaning of ‘Gossip’. This directly engages with the dampening of joy and friendship in women’s lives.

At the end of August 2023, Silvia Federici came to the Anna Göldi Museum in Ennenda, a small industrial-rural village in Canton Glarus, Switzerland, which is the home of Tisch Zwei Verein (a physical location for women writing architecture activities). The museum describes the life of the servant Anna Göldi, her vulnerabilities and actions through objects and spoken word. A sword hangs over an account of the trials, for she was beheaded, the Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches (1486) is on display. Federici was invited by Geraldine Tedder at gta Exhibitions, women writing architecture and Tine Milz of Theater Neumarkt.

The conversation with Federici was called Gossip, Witches and the Textile Industry, and explored the relationships between the history and provocations contained in Federici’s writing and the valley of the Linth river that runs through Canton Glarus, whose energy fuelled the development of textile weaving and printing during the 19th- and 20th- centuries.