REBUILDING: MOTHER AND FATHER

Dedicated to my mothers and fathers.

“Age: 50 years – being kept in the dark – outcome rage
Result – frustration by knowledge
Age: 10 years – insatiable curiosity – rage indignation
Result rage
Exclusion
Age:1 year – being abandoned – why are they abandoning me
Where are they
Age: 3 months – famished and forgotten
Age: 1 month – fear of death “ Louise Bourgeois „Destruction of the Father – Reconstruction of the Father”, Schriften und Interviews 1923-2000, (own translation, Alexandra Leisser)

The starting point for Anita Steinwidder’s series is six pairs of shoes – three female, three male – which she transforms into object-pictures. Set in object frames, they appear as symbolic portraits of mother and father figures. Each figure is ambiguous and ambivalent, positioned between care and severity, protection and authority, openness and secrecy.

The artistic process follows a gesture of deconstruction and reconstruction: the shoes are dismantled, only to be reassembled seam by seam. “The seam – stitch after stitch – into the decades-old leather is painful, and in its repetition – like weaving – it becomes a form of therapy.”

This repetition, this inscription of traces, is both a physical and a symbolic act: injury and healing overlap. The tangle of threads remains visible and unordered, yet it is nevertheless shaped – a metaphor for the inextricable weave of memory, origin, and identity. The signs of use in the materials – the dirt, the worn surfaces – are not concealed, but remain an integral part of the works.

“They are witnesses of time, of lived experience, of how the wearers related to their belongings. These traces are a source of inspiration and the poetry of these works.”

Steinwidder’s practice thus connects to women artists who have transformed everyday materials into poetic-political constellations. For instance, Louise Bourgeois, who worked through familial trauma in the act of sewing and weaving, or Mona Hatoum, who reshaped familiar objects into unsettling, often uncanny forms. Steinwidder’s works share this tension between intimacy and estrangement, between personal impulse and collective resonance.

“We had only one pair of shoes.” This phrase, born of post-war scarcity, speaks for an entire generation whose daily lives were marked by deprivation, hard work, and humility. The shoes transformed here into art already carry this history within them. Steinwidder does not silence them, but highlights and brings them to life.

REBUILDING : MOTHER AND FATHER is therefore not only a work inspired by autobiography, but also a reflection on broader questions: on role models and authority, on care and power, on what is inherited and what must be recomposed. Shoes – banal and everyday – appear here as carriers of a double memory: personal and collective, fragmented yet reassembled, wounded and at the same time healed.

• Anita Steinwidder, 2020
• Photos: Klaus Fritsch