Walking on Water

2021

Site‑specific performance, installation, handcrafted conceptual footwear, choreographed movement and curated operatic sound work.

Project description

Walking on Water is a site‑specific performance project that examines female movement, labour and community through ritualised walking and conceptual craft‑based action. Staged on the rooftop terrace of the T Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice, overlooking the Grand Canal, the performance situates the body within a charged architectural and historical context, using shoes as mediators between past and present.

The project unfolds through a choreographed sequence involving four dancers, a shoemaker at work and the live voice of a soprano. These elements converge to create a layered performance space in which walking becomes a disciplined, collective act rather than a casual gesture. Movement is slowed, repeated and formalised, allowing attention to settle on the relationship between body, object, ground and water - a threshold space marked by instability, labour and transformation.

The project draws on research into female working class communities in early modern Venice, including the book Working Women in Early Modern Venice, and brings this historical framework into dialogue with the lived experiences of women in the city today. Through performance, participants reflected on their own situated histories across age and migration, allowing contemporary bodily experience to be read alongside the labour, mobility and resilience of women of the past.

Developed in collaboration with Piedàterre, makers of traditional Venetian furlane shoes, the footwear situates contemporary female bodies within a lineage of craft, care and endurance. Shoes function here not as costume, but as loaded artefacts through which inherited gestures, histories and working conditions are carried forward. The project pays homage to the women who continue to make furlane slippers today, particularly the female craftspeople living and working in the Friuli region. Their ongoing labour and use of historical sustainable materials, situates the work within a living lineage of shoemaking, where knowledge, care and endurance are transmitted through hands as much as through history.

By bringing together dance, craft and voice, Walking on Water draws connections between present‑day female experience and the often‑unacknowledged labour of women across generations. The performance treats walking as a symbolic and physical negotiation - an act shaped by history, expectation and constraint, yet capable of sustaining collective presence and agency.

The title gestures toward impossibility and faith, suggesting movement across unstable ground as both risk and assertion. Rather than offering transcendence, the work remains grounded in material encounter, insisting that meaning emerges through repetition, labour and bodily experience.

Documentation

Photography: Veronika Motulko

Film:

Presented at

Venice Design Biennial - Site‑specific performance
Terrace of T Fondaco dei Tedeschi, Venice
May - June 2021
Curated by Francesca Giubilei and Luca Berta