A group of women walk the streets of Cologne in dresses made from plastic bottles, modelling Sylvia’s latest collection for the upcoming climate change season. Matching red umbrellas catch the rain and cut through 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, Sylvia playfully prompts people to openly think about what climate change means.

Extract from catalogue essay

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.

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.

Adam Gezcy, Social Exchange and Life, 2009, Catalogue essay, Blue Oyster Gallery, Dunedin

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