Piles of discarded clothes and accessories always affect us in rather negative ways: the images of piles of rags and shoes in concentration camps, for example, immediately conjure up in our minds the atrocities and the horrors endured by the people who left them behind.
In his "Venus of the Rags" (1967, 1974) Michelangelo Pistoletto juxtaposed instead an industrial replica of a classical statue representing the Roman goddess of love, beauty and fertility, with a large pile of clothes heaped on the floor.
The goddess seems to have her face buried in the clothes, representing a degraded idea of the western canon of beauty. The garments could be interpreted as shadows of human existences turned into rags, but the installation could also hint at physical and tangible proofs of consumerism (the clothes) and at the ephemeral nature of beauty (Venus).
In the first "Venus of the Rags" Pistoletto used pieces of fabrics that he had employed to clean the reflective surfaces of his mirror paintings that he began to produce in the early 1960s; he then gradually replaced the rags with second-hand clothes that ended up turning into a critique of the cycles of consumption.
French artist Christian Boltanski took the discourse further in more recent years with his installations such as "No Man's Land" or "Personnes" employing tons of used clothing symbolising death and life.
As highlighted in a previous post, discarded clothes (and, if you lost someone dear to you and had to go through their clothes, you probably experienced this in person) make us think about the shortness of life, but they also connect us with life since they preserve the shapes of our bodies once we remove them.
Boltanski's shapeless mountains of rags call therefore to mind someone's absence, while they also preserve the essence, the souls of the human beings who wore them and who have turned into anonymous ghosts.
Piles of shoes recently took centre stage in a new performance by the Scottish Ballet: "Each Other" - a commissioned piece by the Israeli-Dutch choreographic duo (Uri) Ivgi & (Johan) Greben (with music by Tom Parkinson) - debuted last week as part of Dance International Glasgow (DIG) 2017.
The piece is performed by dancers dressed in rags on a set covered in 5,000 pairs of shoes - from sneakers to everyday footwear - in all sizes and shapes.
There are no pointe shoes on sight, but there is instead a lot of pain and desperation, as dancers wander through the shoes as if looking for something - or rather someone - that belonged to them.
As the piece progresses performers clear spaces in the piles of shoes, build trenches with them, get buried under them or arrange tomato red shoes in a circle.
Shoes become therefore an integral part of the choreography and, while the final meaning remains open to individual interpretations, it is clear that Ivgi & Greben took as inspiration the times we are living in.
The discarded accessories evoke indeed death camps; migrants and refugees flying their countries and dying before reaching freedom or becoming the protagonists of empty political diatribes.
In a way the pile of shoes in the performance is linked with consumerism as well and with our global obsession to buy and spend: in one section of the choreography the shoes seem to flank a sort of catwalk runway; the tomato red footwear, rather than evoking the iconic Powell and Pressburger's Red Shoes, turn into pools of blood, while the ragged clothing and bare feet of the dancers could also hint at sweatshops and at the divide between rich and poor countries.
These themes seem to fit in with Fashion Revolution Week (until 30th April).
Launched to commemorate the Rana Plaza factory collapse, where 1,138 people were killed and many more injured on 24th April 2013, Fashion Revolution Week culminates with a main campaign encouraging consumers to ask who makes our clothes and demanding greater transparency in the fashion supply chain. Yet it looks like there may be more powerful messages about consumptions and exploitation in the performing arts at the moment than in trendy but temporary campaigns.
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