Elisabetta Costa

Elisabetta is an architect and multidisciplinary designer based in London. After completing her undergraduate degree at the University of Florence in 2018, she worked and collaborated with different practices in Florence, Copenhagen and London in the fields of architecture, interior and exhibition design, creating physical and digital installations.

Originally from Italy, through the unpacking of her personal experience she investigates the impact of Italian culture and society on the perception of bodies, femininity and the creation of self-identity. Engaging with different media, such as text, photography, image making and film, her practice explores the fictional world of the interiors and domestic as a material stage for a performance.

Appendix for a play is a project about the disruption, manipulation and reconstruction of different ideals of femininity and female identity within Italian family and culture. It is a staged spatial performance, a visual play without bodies that aims to untangle specific behaviors that are tied to a socially constructed ideal of womanhood.

The proposal aims to design a series of stages in order to show how gender stereotypes and imposed behaviors are still present and laying on the back structure of Italian culture, and therefore reflected into physical spaces. The design is opening a new narrative and speculation on social roles, constructed behaviors and bodies performance.

The project approaches the issue of gender identity and female empowerment in Italy by manipulating the archetypes of the altar and the shrines, which are architectural and spatial tools related to the rituals of sacrifice and adoration. The altar and the shrine are not only restricted to religious spaces, but also translated into the domestic spaces, bringing in specific hierarchies and behaviors. On the other hand, the narrative of the project is based on the contents of the book 'La Vera Signora', a manual of good manners for 'real ladies', written and published in Italy in 1952. The book brings together descriptions and imperatives not only on how a lady should take care of the household, but also on how she should look, think and act within both private and public spheres.

The final outcome of the project proposes the design of six different stages. Each stage is presented through a series of three images that form part of a live performance, introducing the correlations between the construction of the image itself and the original text as a tool for reconstructing contemporary narratives through physical space, performance and script.

The narrative of the project is based on the book La Vera signora, a manual of good manners for 'real ladies' written by Elena Canino in 1952. The contents of the book follow the ideal timeline of the life of a woman, bringing together descriptions, suggestions and imperatives not only on how a lady should take care of the household, but also on how she should look, think and act within both private and public spheres. I abstracted and translated a series of ideal situations from the book, that I used as the basis on top of which I started developing a spatial investigation and new speculative narrative that aim to tackle the actual conditions of women in Italy today, and the consequent perception of gender whether is has always been subjected to a specific cultural construction. Unpacking the contents of the book, I constructed a series of six stages aiming to bring to the light the tension between the impact of tradition, heritage and religion on contemporary society and the urge to emancipate from a socially constructed ideal of femininity.

The first impression of the house and, therefore, of its inhabitants, comes entering the waiting room. Pushed out of the domestic walls, the waiting room is not just an entrance anymore, but it is instead the space of the temporary and the undefined.

The waiting room is the translation into physical space of the being allowed of a multiple choice, of the appearance of a spectrum of possible beings. Here, she is not subjected to time or identity.

She considers the bedroom as a personal sacrarium, the private space of her intimacy. The bedroom is a space closed off to strangers, hidden at the center of the house, that she should defend from intruders and chaos. The bed is the new altar of an uncontrolled and unprescribed series of rituals that are compressed within the privacy of the bedroom. Escaping any of regimes of order, discipline, hygiene, the space reflects the freedom of the body.

In the bedroom, the intruder is not physical, but it is the hidden and inflexible perception of bodies and sexuality, that are restricted to very specific ideals of chastity and decency. Although she is alone, she is also still subjected to the ideal of being delicate, composed and chaste, and along with it her identity is hanging in between the freedom of privacy and the expectation of a role she should fulfill.

As the dining room is the invariable cardinal point of the household, the feast becomes the celebration of domestic life and the dining table becomes the physical altar where the ritual of communality takes place.

She has several duties and tasks to take care of during the feast: she is the host, the master, the director of the domestic theatre. On the other side, the ritual of communality is outshining the process and the labour of a character behind it, which is proved by the solitude of a single meal.

The studio is the space of writing, of the power of taking decisions - it is the ideological reproduction of the a gendered subjectivity which occupies it. In the studio, the disturbance is causing the collapse of order and silence. She works, reads, cleans, and silently takes care of the family.

The studio is portraying the duality of labor she carries within the household. The disturbance shakes the space showing the tension between the independence and the process towards it - it is the confused overlapping of different characters, personalities, temporalities, all compressed and coexisting within the same space.

The boudoir is the shrine of femininity, where she patiently composes her appearance.

The essential elements of the boudoir - a spacious wardrobe, a large dressing table, a comfortable armchair, light curtains - are translated into the setting of a chaotic and collective ritual of vanity.

The salon, the theatre, the conference room, the gathering of a social event are the ultimate stages of the her public performance. It is the space of language, interventions, overheard, conversations, signs. The stage where the performance is subjected to public judgement and consideration.

The rehearsal is the stage where all the roles merge together, constructing the final character of the play. But it also is, finally, the place of the collision between her private, ideal and real identity and her constructed character. The salon is the stage of the revelations of all the hidden layers.

The project refuses the definition of a single main character that acts as a common thread between the stages and inhabits all the spaces. I believe that in this theatre - against the backdrops and amongst the actors - my role as a designer is never that of an author, a chronicler, or a director; as I manipulate the appearance of the rooms through the composition of the image, my role should be indistinguishable from those whom inhabit those spaces.

Through the manipulation of these spaces, I want to emphasise the existence of multiplicity, and of there being more than one image. As a sequence of rooms is stretched into time and space, it becomes clear that another image exists - and this image is produced by the presence and material deposition of the objects that populate the space.

At the same time, the final image is not conclusive, it is not a statement or the solution of an enigma - it is the question mark that is opening the eye to a spatial investigation around gender empowerment and the construction of identity. In the same way, the rooms are the not celebration of a final self, but rather of its constant and endless process of construction and evolution.

Elisabetta Costa

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Royal College of Art