These analytical refections informed the methodology that shaped 'In someone else's shoes, metabolic encounters': a site-specific, participatory performance (duration 1h) of footwear and smartphones belonging to present and absent audiences. Its accumulative creative process, interdependent to its social context and environment, becomes the set for extended choreographies and interactive generative music. Its public presentation places the relationships between the audience and the space into the foreground, since it was premiered during the Pandemic, the Corona regulations, became integral to it.

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Participation: “metabolic encounters” uses the direct engagement of the audience through different media, at all stages of the creative process, as a symbol of human interconnectedness to the ecosystem. At the time, only my colleagues and professors of the university could physically attend the presentation. As they came into the space, they were asked to take of their shoes, which were incorporated into the installation for the duration of the performance (circa 1h). To the public who could not attend, I asked, during the months previous to the graduation, to donate shoes as representatives of their absent bodies in space, (they could attend to the event only via streaming). At the same time, both present and online audiences were interacting with the sound score via their smartphones. An algorithm, was performing the sound score, which the audience could alter live by sending pictures of their shoes to a Telegram bot (called METABOT) connected to the algorithm. The pictures were translated into sound and altered our collective sonorous experience. This element represents the way in which our most common daily activities (like using communication platforms and buying shoes) have a huge impact on the world, in often unknown or unforeseeable ways.

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Materiality: the installation is made up of materials that are not new and not purchased by me, but belonging to those who experience the work. I was interested not only in the objects themselves but in the relationships with their owners, I chose to address these intimate relationships with footwear and smartphones, as a way to explore the affective power of non-human agents on our daily experience of the world. Footwear and smartphones are for me the interfaces between our bodies and our direct surroundings, whether physical or cognitive, carrying apparent traces of our relationship to the world: how we walk, communicate, experience reality and how we consume. Conceptually, these objects became proxies of globalisation itself, beholding the stories of the many actants of our consuming society.

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Perception: the use of very familiar objects, in unfamiliar ways and within the art context, plays with human imagination and perception, aiming at opening spaces for self-awareness and ecological awareness. How can the audience project their own bodies back on their objects, and experience a sense of belonging, that goes beyond ownership? The audience who could attend was seated on highly elevated platforms at the side of the stage, while the streaming of the performance was filmed from a camera hanged from the ceiling. This offered the viewers the perspective of a bird’s eye view, a colonial view of creating pictures that look down on a dominated world. This perspective is extended and abstracted to our phone screen through google maps, and other devices that define our perception of time and space, while we are scrolling at the screen.