ALIVE SHOES: The Striped Arch of Ancona by Jonathan Allen

For those of us living in London, the idea of the synergy between the worlds of fashion and art, the overlap, the creative dialogue, is one which is rather commonplace. The V&A regularly venerates living sartorial legends, the same people who frequent the cobblestones of Somerset House during LFW are to be seen popping up at gallery openings and exhibit launches all over the city. Even the Queen recognizes that hatters and dressmakers as artists in their own right with the handing out of OBEs and such to people like Stephen Jones and Amanda Wakeley.

THE ALIVE SHOES

But tis not the case everywhere. Fashion and art, and let's refine what I mean here by art, contemporary art, in many places of the world are cold strangers, creative coworkers inhabiting the same office space but never quite managing to trade words during those awkward and slow elevator rides at the end of the day. At least, this is what I learned to be the case, surprisingly, in Italy when I journeyed to Ancona (and what a journey it was: I missed my RyanAir Flight--I will not rant I will not rant I will not rant--and ended flying to Pisa and thence training it to Florence then Bologna and then at last down to Ancona) to witness the installation (and uninstallation) of another manifestation of large scale project which fuses artistic expression with fashion and sustainability. The program, which launches online today in New York, London, Italy and the Netherlands, is called ALIVE SHOES. And that's kind of exactly what it is. Being a country so richly steeped in the traditions of leather working and shoe making, Alive Shoes takes as its artistic medium intricately crafted leather shoes made traditionally, and has brought in an array of talented artists from around the world to create the various installations (think: giant cow in a field made of rainbow shoes).

Various components of the "Alive Shoe": 1) each project is assigned a Greek letter, in the case of the Striped Arch, a lambda, which is then stamped inside shoe along with a limited edition number. 2) Also on the tongue, a sketch of the installation and the artist's signature guarantee their ultra limited edition-ness. 

All the structures are temporary sculptures, and have gone up all over the Italian landscape, both urban, rural and on the wine dark seas of the Mediterranean (one artists built a shoe raft!). After they are filmed and photographed, the installations are deconstructed the the limited number of shoes utilized in the designs become available for purchase on the project's website.

Now that you're up to speed on what ALIVE SHOES is all about, let 's take a look at the ALIVE SHOES which awaited me at the end of my long journey to Ancona...

Weird teletubby in a bottle in the shipyard

 I'd only ever been to Ancona once. When I was 17 and en route via SuperFast Ferry to Piraeus, Greece. 30+ hours of unsupervised teenagedom on the high Adriatic, you can imagine. So when my gracious host (and founder of Alive Shoes), Luca Botticelli, collected me from the train station  I was more than a little bit shocked to learn that Ancona, and the surrounding region, is actually the shoe manufacturing hub of Italy (you mean ALL "made in Italy" shoes don't come from the innermost recesses of the shoe oompa loompas slaving away by hand since the time of Audrey Hepburn in the Palazzo Ferragamo in Florence??). Nope, all the magic, from Prada to Puma, happens here. And evidently there are the outlets to prove it.

Jonathan gets down to the nitty gritty of it

Back back to the matter at hand, the installation. The artist in question for this particular leg (no pun intended) of the project was a very charming young man (and New Yorker), Jonathan Allen, who is best known for his collage imagery. He and his lovely wife, Joanna, had traveled all the way to Ancona from Brooklyn to take on the challenge of working an installation filling in the "negative space" of an ancient Roman arch with color, shoe color. The arch was that of Trajan, erected in around 115 ACE and is one of the finest Roman monuments in the area. The arch (renamed Porta Pia in the 18th century) became a famous landmark for ships approaching Rome's greatest Adriatic port. And so it was here, with this ancient edifice erected to celebrate power and conquest, to impress and dominate a harbor's landscape, that the vision of a young New York artist began to take off.

And it went like this:

The days prior to my arrival had been spent matching color tones and tying hundreds of shoes to long wooden planks which were then brought in pieces to the site of the arch on the morning of . To  my former Classicist mind, the repetition of the endless lines of shoes as they lay on the ground waiting to go up, evoked a very strong image of war, or the destructive force of war  as it was in the ancient world (i.e. say it with me now...CONQUEST!!!), contrasted with modern ideals of peace and sustainability. The rows of shoes were like columns of soldiers, marching into battle underneath this triumphal arch, in an endless taskforce. However, the eerie sensation of the discarded footwear seemed to conjure up imagery from the Holocaust for me, jolting me back to the 21st century (Roman centurions didn't rock out in hot pink Botticelli trainers afterall), and the more modern moments of significance at work here. Namely, the rainbow color, the idea of filling in a hollow space, all point towards visual conceptualizations of peace. A peace imaged or a peace actual. Regardless, consider this little rant my personal reading of the installation. It's all down to the biggies: war, peace, love, life, death. Gotta love those Romans...

The planks were then nailed together and the shoes secured individually. 

Until it looked something like this

Then it was bombs away! It took the whole team to lift the shodden planks from the ground. And the one crane they'd hired wasn't enough, so a long lunch was had by all a second lift was sought out.

It then arrived and the installation surged onwards

First plank up!

Jonathan (right) and Luca (left) hang out with the time lapse photographer. Poor chap had to stay out there for at least 12+ hours....click...click...click...he did split the duty with another though, luckily

Like ducks in a row

Making sure all is level

From inside the arch

I love the juxtaposition here of color, texture and time. The modern blue leather shoes against the enormous ancient wooden doors, now long since stripped of their once glorious bronze embellishments. This is so what I'm about.

Tools of the trade

Nearly there...

Scraps of discarded fabric from the planks

Getting ready to fill in the gaps...

Husband and wife know best! Joanna fills in the gaps in the planks from a lofty perch on Johnathan's shoulders. Awww

Like so

Very nearly there...at sunset! It was nearly midnight by the time we got it all down

Jonathan inspects the final touches

Et Voila! ALIVE SHOES!!!!!!! 

As a finishing touch, Jonathan set down on shoe of each color in front of its respective column, it had the effect of making the whole arch feel as if it were trying to come forward...perhaps to speak

The inside was absolutely stunning, the shadows cast by the the shoes created an architectural pattern of the knave of a gothic cathedral. In attempting to instigate a trans-cultural trans-temporal artistic dialogue across the ancient and modern times, the arch, the artwork, gave unto itself (ALIVE shoes!) and took on, of its own accord, a medieval persona as well.

The shadows of shoelaces flipping in the wind cast spooky tentacle like shadows of their own upon the ancient stone, giving the overall shadow the feeling of movement, of BEING ALIVE.

 After all this, the shoes had to come down. The disassembly went smoothly and quickly, though it pained me to see it come down, having literally just reached completion. But sic vita est. With art, like with fashion, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Sometimes we just have to realize that that sometimes one quick glance is enough to do the trick, and that the point of art, of fashion and the creative process lies in its cyclical and circular nature: tear it all down and start creating all over again.

Be sure to visit ALIVE SHOE's cool, interactive website, which goes live today to learn more about the project! And look out for my in depth interview with Jonathan, coming your way later today or tomorrow.