Boots for Rising Waters is the latest footwear designed by Sylvia Schwenk for the upcoming season of climate change.
They are a stylish blue and black high-platformed-gumboot. The glossy black stacked soles of the Boots range in height from 10 to 30 cm. This allows the wearer to select a height appropriate for the days level of flooding.
Helpers must assist the wearer of the shoes to walk. A sign that raises the question of whether only the wealthy can adapt to climate change?
Boots for Rising Waters premiered as a performance of a fashion show on the stairs of the Dom Cathedral in Cologne. In the performance, nine women. assisted by their helpers, model the Boots. The stairs function as a fashion-runway and the everyday users of the public space as the audience. The participants precariously ascend the rising levels of the steps with decreasing mobility. They ultimately cluster at the doors of the cathedral, seated with their feet protectively drawn up against the tide.
This work was adapted and performed at the Blue Oyster Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand in 2009 and at Artereal Gallery, in Sydney Australia in 2010.
Boots for Rising Waters with their exaggeratedly raised platforms are a humorous, baroque theatricalization of an issue of great seriousness. This work is part of a larger series about environmental concerns called, They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.1
1 Joni Mitchell, “A big yellow taxi”, 1970