REBUILDING: MYSELF

“Gold also shimmers through dirt.” (Theresa Feodorowna Ries)

With REBUILDING : MYSELF, Anita Steinwidder continues her artistic exploration of identity, memory, and transformation, closely intertwining it with questions of sustainability. Building on REBUILDING : MOTHER AND FATHER (2020), where historical shoes were arranged into metaphorical family assemblages, she now shifts the focus to the self – as a nexus of relationships, experiences, and social entanglements.

The material of the series consists of used, damaged, or unwearable sneakers – donations or street finds, relics of the growing textile waste problem and symbols of a consumer-driven contemporary culture. Instead of allowing these objects to vanish in the cycle of disposal and overproduction, Steinwidder transforms them into sculptural textile assemblages. Through wrapping, stitching, and interweaving, she creates complex, cartographic compositions in which shoe fragments, fabric remnants, bandages, and bindings are joined into new constellations.

Traces of dirt, wear, and decay remain visible – not as flaws, but as poetic markers of time, biography, and collective experience. Each fragment simultaneously speaks of individual life paths and global structures: migration, consumption, social pressure, disintegration, and renewal. Thus, the series reflects both personal memory and self-positioning as well as broader social processes of exclusion, transformation, and regeneration.

The textile connection of the parts becomes a metaphor for social and emotional bonds: for that which carries, holds, but can also break. In this gesture, Steinwidder draws on strategies of Arte Povera, developing new aesthetic and political dimensions from what is considered worthless.

Through her consistent resource-conscious practice – working almost exclusively with found or donated materials – Steinwidder understands sustainability not as a side aspect but as an artistic principle. The transformation of waste into meaning, of traces into narratives, of fragments into spaces of resonance, makes REBUILDING : MYSELF a multifaceted artistic statement that is autobiographical, collective, ecological, and poetic at once.

• Anita Steinwidder, ongoing series since 2023
• Photos: Klaus Fritsch