Abstract:

This contribution presents the initial results of a two-year research project titled “The visibility of female creators in Spain in the 21st century” (VMC-DiSEA). The aforesaid research project aims to determine the visibility of female creators in the fields of Design, Art and Architecture and who have worked in Spain during the 21st century. This research project is being carried out by the research group DiSEA (Design, Society, Education, Art) of ESIT (School of Engineering and Technology) at Universidad Internacional de La Rioja in Spain.

During this phase, data collection is performed through semi-structured interviews to relevant stakeholders in order to learn about female authors within their professional fields.

The Action Plan for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda proposes as a goal to “achieve gender equality and to empower all women and girls” (AECID, 2018, p.30), which is why this objective is adopted as the main line of work for this project, due to its topicality and relevance.

According to data from the Women's Observatory (Ministerio de Igualdad, n.d.) the portrayal of women by the media distorts the achievements being made in various fields, in their day-to-day lives and in their work. The same could be said of social networks. Virality and the need to build a digital identity are some of the consequences of a society that is partially misinformed due to an excess of information, which slows down intellectual growth and the construction of an egalitarian environment where gender does not define the importance of achievements.

It is therefore necessary to delve deeper into the visibility of women. For, as de Diego (2018) suggests, there are always too many question marks -and too many parentheses- in the lives of women. Women in art, as in other contexts, have usually been looked at in a biased, peripheral, marginal and diffuse way, and in turn, they have been forced to look from the sidelines, from an absent or imposed gaze.

The purpose of this study is to contextualize this situation in order to carry out an analysis of the visibility and presence of their works in the media, analyzing mentions, promotion and vocabulary associated with the descriptions of female authors and their work.

The result of this study will contribute to the creation of a more comprehensive overview of the situation of women in the fields of Design, Art and Architecture in Spain in the last twenty years. To this end, in this phase, the main result of this research is the collection of data and its processing in graphic format (infographics) to facilitate the interpretation of the information obtained.

Keywords:

Women, Visibility, Art, Design, Architecture.