This shoe sculpure is part of a series of 20 sculptures of shoes dedicated to the most relevant women in history, literature, cinema and comics. This project has been commissioned by Superstudio Milan and ANCI, and chosen as opening event for the MICAM 2006.
Alice in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll's novel 'Alice in Wonderland'; represents the metaphor from childhood to puberty with its exciting discovers, fears and contrasting emotions. Alice is still a child when she passes through the mirror and enters a fairytale world but that actually hides, although not so well, deception and dangerous realities. During her fantastic journey, Alice will find some characters more appropriate to mental homes, she will eat mushrooms with properties more similar to narcotics than magical, she’ll hear some nonsense speeches worthy the theatre of the absurd and she will risk to be beheaded several times by the hand of a despot and hysterical queen reigning over the fear of her subjects. Following ferocious political satires and happenings far from what the gilded world of childhood should be, the author, best known in his private life for some particular weird interest to children, leaves some clues of perversion and refinement that will be understood only later. Many fairytales of the past used to hide subliminal messages and some 20 years ago cartoons transmitted not much reassuring values: nowadays the situation is not that better; if, in a way, there is more attention not to show death as a spectacle, on the other hand cartoons are nothing but a marketing product treated for supporting the setting of the correlated merchandise, identifying children as very precocious consumer’s target.'Alice's sandal is the one that she could be wearing at the end of the novel, when she says to the Queen of Hearts a just: ';Stop it! Who do you think you are? You’re nothing but the queen of a pack if cards!'; Alice grew up, she is no more scared as now she is self-conscious. She steps on the queen’s card; with its tinged cruelty this story teaches us that life is circular and that it takes a second to switch from losers to winners, from victims to executioners, from the dead to the living.'
Courtesy of Daniele Fontana at Whitenoisephotography 2007.
