“Life preservers” is from a body of work called, “They paved paradise put up a parking lot”, which showcases Schwenk’s latest footwear and dresses for the upcoming climate change season.
Walking through the streets, a group of women use the city of Cologne as their fashion runway, modelling a series of dresses made with plastic bottles called, “Life Preservers. As it was raining on the day of the performance the women used matching red umbrellas, which gave them a more striking presence in the grey urban streets. “Life Preservers” plays on an amusing, imaginary double-bind based on the extremes of climate change: to fill the bottles would be good for drought but would make one sink in the event of a flood, and vice versa.
Through this performance, Schwenk playfully prompts people to openly think about what climate change means.
They paved paradise put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swingin’ hot spot
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone
They paved paradise put up a parking lot1
For all its serious and considered social comment, there is light-heartedness that pervades Schwenk’s work. But light-heartedness should not be confused with irresponsibility. Rather it is an irony that belongs to art that can easily oscillate between the need to speak out over unfortunate state of affairs, and the triumph of being able to find a solution, however far-fetched. These are strategies that have a long and exalted history. Schwenk’s interventions can be traced back to the theatrical exercises of Émile Jacques-Dalcroze and Berthold Brecht. Dalcroze dispensed with the proscenium arch, the barrier between actor and audience that acted as the signifying threshold between reality and the theatrical imaginary. With this gone, theatre no longer needed to give the illusion of life, but rather it could revel in its many devices and subterfuges, drawing attention to them. Brechts “Verfremdungseffekt” [alienation] was an antidote to a much more insidious social alienation brought about by the false consciousness that everything is what it appears to be. The exaggerations and at times heavy-handed formalizations of such theatre were used to jolt audiences out of the former lethargy.
In the same vein, Schwenk’s works function as a kind of galvanic spark that seeks to alter the viewer’s point of view, at least in some small, but lasting, way.
— Extract from “Social Exchange and Life” by Adam Gezcy
1 “Big yellow taxi” —Joni Mitchell