Irina Davidovici — Archives Throught the Lens of Gender

This interview was conducted for the series “Archives Through the Lens of Gender” on the occasion of the exhibition “ Crossed Histories: Gae Aulenti, Ada Louise Huxtable, Phyllis Lambert, on Architecture and the City ” at Archizoom in the fall of 2025.

Irina Davidovici draws on her experience as an archive director of gta Archiv in Zurich to highlight the quantitative and qualitative underrepresentation of women. She describes a process of “archiving absence”, combining alternative sources (testimonies, personal notebooks, inter-archive collaborations) and narrative reconstruction in the face of absent or lost documents. She emphasizes the speculative and inherently fragmentary nature of historical work. Drawing on figures like Flora Ruchat-Roncati, she shows how subjective narratives can subvert official histories.