Making Visible

Making Visible invites participants to collectively discuss how through mapping, hearing and imaging women, we can make their enormous contributions to architecture and their role in society more visible.

Yushi Li will talk about her photography, included in the Portraits of a Practice exhibition in the AA Gallery, and how it challenges the traditional and historically dominant male gaze by exploring female desire and creative expression in terms of how we see the world and our role within it.

Sarah Ackland will discuss her podcast – 29% Equal – and how it celebrates important women who have shaped the experience of our cities and spaces as well as how we practice architecture today.

Sarah Castle will present the work of Part W, specifically the women’s work mapping campaign that seeks to change the lack of representation of projects by women from collective knowledge, maps and archives.

Together, we will examine the impact of these different methods of making all those who identify as women more visible and what more still needs to be done to make our built environment, and those who shape it, more equitable in their representation.

Sarah Ackland is a practicing architect at muf architecture/art and a PhD researcher at Newcastle University. Her PhD research explores women in space through feminist and auto-ethnographic practices. Sarah is the host of the podcast ‘29% Equal’ which shares stories between two women in architecture.

Sarah Castle is a founding member of Part W – an action group that brings together women who work across architecture and design, infrastructure and construction, to campaign for gender parity across the built environment. She is a director and founder of IF_DO, a multi award-winning architecture practice based in London that is dedicated to creating projects with a positive impact on users, the environment, and the surrounding community.

Yushi Li is a Chinese artist, teacher and researcher based in London. Li has been selected as one of the Foam talents in 2022 and RPS Hundred Heroines in 2019. Her work has been shown in different countries, including solo exhibitions at Fotogalleri Vasli Souza in Oslo, Union Gallery in London and group exhibitions at the UK Parliament, RIBA and Fotografiska New York, and featured in several international media and publications, such as BBC, The Guardian, and Libération. Li’s work mainly engages with the question of the gaze, using photography as her method to explore and question the gendered power relationship inherent in different looking relations in the internet age.

This event is part of the Portraits of Practice event series that accompanies the exhibition on show in the AA Gallery titled Portraits of a Practice: The Life and Work of MJ Long. The series takes the themes and topics explored within the exhibition as its starting point to discuss the gendering of spaces and objects within architecture and its related disciplines.

Please get in touch to let us know of any access requirements that you might have and how we can best accommodate these. If you are unable to attend physically but would like to participate in the event remotely please email publicprogramme@aaschool.ac.uk.

Image: Women’s Work: London, a map by Part W, designed by EDIT.