in my shoes

Disorientaiton, Aging and the Body as a Site of Mediation

MA Thesis in Art Education,
Institute for Art and Design Education,
Hochschule für Kunst und Gestaltung, FHNW, Basel Switzerland
June 2025

in my shoes
Aging can be disorienting. When I look in the mirror, I see a version of myself I barely recognize: older, heavier, different. Internally, I still feel 15 or 20 years younger, as if my life is still full of potential futures. Yet as I age, those possibilities feel more distant. I look at old photos and remember being critical of my appearance, thinking I didn’t measure up. Now I want to shake that younger self and say- enjoy what you have. And I wonder: in another 20 years, will I look back at myself now with the same disbelief?

Time doesn’t pass evenly. For many people in female bodies, menopause brings an accelerated shift: a transformation that feels sudden, uninvited, and deeply physical. That process, and the disorientation it brings, became the seed of this project. Instead of pushing it away, I chose to stay with it. To examine it. To share it.

in my shoes is a participatory performance exploring how bodily change, especially the kinds that come with aging, can be unsettling, intimate, even beautiful. Friends and invited performers are asked to stand in high-heeled shoes made of ice or wear ice jewelry stained with food coloring. As the ice melts, it leaves behind colorful stains on clothing and puddles on the ground, traces of time, weight, and contact. The jewelry leaves marks where it touches the skin and fabric, transforming what might usually be seen as a source of embarrassment into poetic traces.

The shoes melt from underfoot, slipping away, leaving performers struggling to balance, gripping with their toes to stay upright. Some step away to rest, others endure. As they stand together, they talk, offering encouragement, sharing sensations, quietly coaching each other through the discomfort. This mutual exchange becomes a subtle choreography of care, turning individual struggle into collective endurance. Each body responds differently; each moment of vulnerability is unique and visible.

To those passing by, these moments may seem accidental or ephemeral, a strange little scene unfolding in public space. But for the performers, it is an embodied encounter with loss, vulnerability, and transformation. Just as aging marks our bodies in uneven and unexpected ways, these melting objects leave behind both discomfort and unexpected beauty.

The project is grounded in phenomenological inquiry: how we live through our bodies and come to know ourselves in space and time. Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology offers a lens through which disorientation becomes a method rather than a problem: an invitation to reflect on how bodies become misaligned with their environments and expectations. Simone de Beauvoir’s reflections on aging reveal it as an existential negotiation between self-image and social perception. Susan Sontag’s critique of the double standard of aging highlights how femininity is bound to youth, while aging in female bodies often leads to cultural invisibility.

These temporary encounters stage bodily disorientation: the breakdown of balance, the need for adaptation, the slow surrender to change. This work pushes back, staging beauty in fragility, presence in discomfort, and solidarity in shared instability.

Through melting, marking, and conversation, in my shoes makes visible what is often hidden: the labor of staying upright, the cold of social exclusion, and the strange, quiet intimacy of bodily transformation.