Living Differently, Seeing Differently:Carla Accardi's temporary structures (1965-1972)

This article takes as its focus a small group of transparent temporary shelters made by Rome-based artist Carla Accardi between 1965 and 1972. Described by the artist as 'the simplest idea of home', these temporary dwellings are made using Sicofoil, an industrially produced plastic material. Accardi has consistently spoken about these environments in terms of offering another way of living. As such these works resonate with the larger tendency of this period to look to other social models and forms of existence. They bear obvious affinities with the emerging discourse on nomadism, the legacy of Buckminster Fuller's dome culture, the anti-modernist rhetoric of the International Movement for an Imagist Bauhaus, and the inflatable, lightweight, and adaptable structures that animate so much of 1960s architectural practice. In this context, Accardi's Tenda (1965) has even been described as a prototype for many of the temporary structures made by artists associated with Arte Povera throughout the 1960s. Moreover, for Accardi, this signalled a key turning point in her practice at a moment when she had wanted to transform the experience of making and viewing art. The implications of Accardi's use of Sicofoil are examined here to ask how the artist's proposal for an alternative way of living could be premised on a way of seeing differently and how in turn this might be made to speak to feminist concerns with which Accardi was involved as founding member of La Rivolta Femminile. Specifically, Kittler explores in what ways Accardi's continued commitment to art could speak to a utopian possibility for feminism.