The House of Saud Dolls. A blind date

The exhibition contains the work done for the "The House of Saud Dolls" project by a group of students of the Prince Sultan University in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), and is curated from the School of Architecture of the Pontifical University of Salamanca. In the exhibition will be in COAM, it has joined the interpretation they have made a group of students at the Pontifical University of Salamanca in Madrid, in an exercise of "Blind Date", a unique dialogue on the work done by the Saudi students.

In Saudi Prince Sultan University in Riyadh, the second year of Architecture, was conducted during the months of November and December 2015, a short but substantive project that sought to empower young women studying there. The result was five design dollhouses who question the Saudi domestic space and therefore much of the Muslim world. This project was chosen within the framework of the Biennial Women Looks 2016, organized by the association Women in the Visual Arts. As part of this Biennial began in March 2016 a dialogue with the "Western world", through an exercise of reinterpretation of dollhouses mentioned, by a group of students and young architects of the Pontifical University of Salamanca in Madrid . The latter only received the statement of Saudi exercise and a resulting image of the house. Not knowing the authors nor the processes that led to these houses, they gave name to the subtitle of the project: Blind Date.

The fruitful dialogue triggered will be displayed at the College of Architects of Madrid during the month of September, and will recreate the space of the Saudi housing abstractly: inside the world of women, private, unknown and full of content; not empty or subject to the macho machinery as has wanted to see in the world. Outside, a look neutral, slow and critical at the same time; which expresses the need to reflect on the ability to interpret other, emphasizing discovered platitudes.

During the second edition of the International Congress of Architecture and Gender, "Matrices" in Lisbon in March 2014 Mara Sanchez Llorens, assistant professor at the Pontifical University of Salamanca in Madrid met Margarita Gonzalez Cardenas, assistant professor in the Department of Architecture the Prince Sultan University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Both shared their perspectives on the Academy, professional practice regarding women, and intercultural dialogue.