The Eel, the Dowry and the Seamstress shows how human lives link places to take RIBA Dissertation Award

Bianca Zucchelli for The Eel, the Dowry and the Seamstress
The Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) | UK
Tutor: Edwina Attlee

It was into her grandmother’s world, the small Italian fishing village of Comacchio, that Bianca Zucchelli delved for her dissertation. Zucchelli’s research and interviews with her grandmother and her seamstress friends in Comacchio – sometimes known as Little Venice for its lagoon – revealed it as a place of making, with a textile industry that is all but invisible.

Zucchelli unearthed a network of interconnected places where women took in piece-work. The locations that are mapped range from convents where classes were set up with looms on which girls were trained from the age of five, to ‘laboratory’ work spaces that have now become shops. Often the women would work in just the attic or a chair placed in the street at the front of the house. At the centre of this scattered industry was the kitchen table, which was a place to weave as much as for housewives to cook and serve meals on.

This watery world of weaving and sewing which circumscribed the lives of its female workers is explored through an eel-tailed avatar in a fictionalised account of a woman’s life, to encompass many women’s experiences through a singular lens. Zucchelli embroidered maps of the town with the steps of the short journeys through a woman’s life, and the skills and processes involved. ‘It was very hard doing the sewing, it gave me a lot of respect for those who did it,’ she says. The story is shot through not only with industrialisation but also fascism; the role of women was encapsulated in the slogan ‘the motherland is also served while sweeping one’s own house’ (1935) and from 1927 there had been strict rules on women receiving salaries. Piece-work allowed some freedom to earn.

This dissertation draws a picture of Comacchio as a ‘boundless invisible factory’ in its own right. It is a reminder of how much happens that is not fully embodied in physical spaces, but how this invisible activity can enrich our understanding of place. It is also a reflection of a now-global industry and all the issues that raises. ‘This was driven by companies from Florence outsourcing – so paying less. Now that is on a more global scale,’ reflects Zucchelli.

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Samir Pandya (Chair) Reader in architecture and director of global engagement at the School of Architecture & Cities of the University of Westminster (UK)
Yorgos Berdos Lecturer in contemporary practice at the University of Dundee, and teaching fellow in computational design and visualisation at the University of Edinburgh (UK)
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Zeynep Kezer Professor of architectural history and director of postgraduate research at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape of Newcastle University (UK)
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André Tavares Architect, curator, writer and researcher at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (Portugal)