During the summer of 2022, the chair of Jan de Vylder at ETH Zurich began a 3-year experiment at the Furka Pass in Switzerland (in:dépendance), 2429 m above sea level and only accessible 4 months a year. Responding to their invitation for proposals for short residences, Women Writing Architecture was represented by Helen Thomas, born in the UK, Emilie Appercé, born in France, and Jaehee Shin, born in Korea, meeting together in this high Swiss pass to consider the work of a woman from a far distant time and place.

The Tale of Genji is a fictional text written by Murasaki Shikibu in the early 11th century. Since the earliest moments of the WWA collective, this book has been an inspiration and a formative challenge: how can a narrative of 54 chapters with more that 400 characters and including almost 800 poems, written in one of the first forms of written Japanese – the traditionally feminine writing style called Kana ­­– on a scroll, in the Imperial court of Heian possibly be conceived of as an architectural text? At in:dépendance we decided to exploit its distance from our everyday reality to test out a chapter of the text called Yugao. One of our frames, the most formal, was its representations in paintings over the last 1000 years considered in relation to the physical conditions that we encountered at the Furka Pass in early September. Another was the issue of translation – in time, place and language – for us from Japanese to English, French and Korean, which we considered in relation to one of our current preoccupations with notation and especially glosses, an early method used in the transformation of vernacular oral languages to written form at around the same time that Murasaki was writing The Tale of Genji.