For International Women’s Day, the Mendini sisters reflect on Mara Voce, a vase from the 100% make-up project, and their father’s deliberate choice to sign it with a female name. In this interview, they explore the meaning behind this creative ruse and an unexpected family connection.
March 8, 2025
1. Let’s start with a name: Mara Voce. She is the author of one of the 100 vases from 100% make-up, a project curated by your father, in which one hundred authors from different disciplines were invited to design a decoration for the same vase, originally designed by Mendini himself. Who is Mara Voce?
Mara Voce is a young Brazilian designer, an imaginary character, Alessandro Mendini himself, a tribute to the feminine world, a gentle face, and an enigmatic gaze on a vase.
2. We don’t know exactly why Mendini chose to sign with a female name or why he selected such an evocative name full of meaning. But could we also see in it a reflection of his approach to design?
We don’t know Alessandro Mendini’s exact reasoning behind choosing the name Mara Voce for this human-faced vase.Perhaps it was a play on sounds and associations: Mara Voce / Voce Amara (Bitter Voice). Perhaps there is a reference to Buddhism. Mendini’s choice to hide behind a female name might also stem from his deeply personal exploration of architecture as a soft, protective, and feminine shell—contrasting with the idea of design as something hard, sharp, and masculine.
Mendini wrote:“It is the allure, so to speak, of the ‘soft’ project versus the ostentatious certainty of the ‘hard’ project—the kind that is prophetic, demagogic, created more to assert itself and its rules than to exist as a new reality. The materials of hard design are those of classical construction: stone, iron, cement, metal, glass. But it is precisely in interior design, in that most protective shell closest to human beings, that the essence of the soft project exists. What are its materials? Fabric, color, atmosphere, memory, light—elements that touch and caress the body without harming it. In this sense, all objects, rooms, façades, arches, statues, and soft furnishings are part of the ‘soft’ project. Because architecture consists of bare, hostile parts that soft materials warm, cover, cushion, and guide back into the maternal womb.”
3. Mendini and Mara Voce: In your family, there was another artist who presented her works under a pseudonym. Could there be a meaningful connection between these two choices?
Marieda Di Stefano was our great-aunt, the sister of our grandmother Fulvia, who was our father’s mother. Marieda was a passionate collector and an excellent ceramicist—an extroverted and generous woman.At the Boschi Di Stefano House Museum in Milan, where the paintings from the vast collection she assembled with her husband Antonio Boschi are displayed and later donated to the City of Milan, there are also some of her ceramic sculptures.They are busts of women with soft and gentle forms, headless figures reminiscent of pre-Columbian ceramics.Zia Mini (“Aunt Mini”, her family nickname) signed her works under the pseudonym Andrea Da Robbio. Just like the clever ruse our father created with Mara Voce, we don’t know if she chose to conceal her identity because being a female artist was difficult in her time. But we do know that it was her personal tribute to the Della Robbia family of ceramicists, whom she admired.Both chose a double identity—Alessandro as a woman, Marieda as a man.It’s fascinating that two people in the same family chose to represent themselves through an alternate persona.
