“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
Virginia Woolf
What is A Zoom of One’s Own?
Almost 100 years after Virginia Woolf delivered the lecture which formed the text of A Room of One’s Own, the Covid-19 Pandemic has limited women’s options for creating and sharing space: the house is full of people, the world outside feels distant, we cannot meet, we cannot travel, we cannot exercise our freedom. Two friends, laStaempfli and Hartley, found themselves turning to zoom to create a digital room of their own; a space for feminist discussion and free expression
Regula Staempfli & Liza Hartley
laStaempfli and Hartley created the podcast A Zoom of One’s Own in 2021 to bring together their perspectives on art, culture, literature and current affairs through a critical feminist lens. For many years, laStaempfli has been active in the continental critical scene as an academic and public intellectual based in Munich. Hartley is a recent Cambridge graduate, poet and writer based in London. Here laStaempfli and Hartley combine the viewpoints of two women whose generational differences offer one another continual challenges to adapt and reflect, and whose love of feminist thinkers like Virginia Woolf, Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Mina Loy, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Susan Neiman, Toni Morrison, Sappho, Donna J Harraway, Audre Lorde and countless others establishes a determination to make female voices heard. Nothing is off the table; no refuge of the patriarchy is safe…
Who are We?
Regula Staempfli
Liza Hartley
Regula Staempfli is made in Switzerland in a non-standardized Data package. Following her grandmothers advise to stay in Switzerland for a good education in order to then to connect with other worlds, she finished High School in Pasadena, studied in Zurich, Bern, N.Y., Berlin and finished her master´s degree on “Mao´s China 1945-1950”. Her PhD (University of Bern at a time the history department was still worth mentioning internationally) coincided with the births and babyhoods of her three kids and focused on the gender construction during the great wars (1914-1945). In Brussels she worked as an independent expert for the EU Commission, for the parliament as a consultant and was the founding member of the “European Citizen´s Initiative ECI”. At the same time laStaempfli kept her engagement at the Lucerne Journalist School MAZ to teach politics to media people (1989-20212). In 2007 she became director of the International Forum of Design in Ulm IFG, a post she held until 2013, when the Foundation IFG had to redirect finances in the building site constructed by Max Bill. Staempfli has taught as a lecturer invite at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris and still works closely with Prof. Dr. Ruedi Baur Design to Context/intégral She holds a position of the “Hannah Arendt Lectures” at the HSG St. Gallen. She is regulary invited to various lectureships in Zurich, Brussels, Amsterdam and Berlin. From 2008-2013 Staempfli held additionally the position of the University Council in Cologne. The former “Lara Croft of political Science” as her students would call her, works as a famously notorious columnist in major Swiss media and was nominated in 2016 among the 100 most powerful women in Switzerland. She does a weekly Clubhouse Show on “Das Design der Woche”, hosts a podcast “Die Podcastin” with Dr. Isabel Rohner, a podcast which has been nominated in 2021 for the Henri Nannen Preis of Journalism, the Grimme-Preis and the Deutscher Podcastpreis. She is also on the board of swissfuture and together with the Swiss National Technology Assessment she produces the “future podcast” on Data and Digital Transformation. Staempfli lives currently in Munich and Vienna where she is involved with artcare, an auction house for contemporary art; her newest “baby” is the “Most Wanted Female Art Auction 2021”.
Her Motto:
„Wer Sehgewohnheiten ändert, durchbricht die Blindspirale“
Liza Hartley was born in Manchester and graduated from Cambridge University in 2019. Her specialism is the construction of the Jewish Female body in the poetry of Mina Loy. She writes poetry and stories which contemplate suffering, embodiment and the age in which she lives.
Motto: “Not only rethinking, but remaking.”