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Since the Empathy Museum was founded by Roman Krznaric in 2015, its inaugural project A Mile in my Shoes has travelled to more than 35 locations across the United Kingdom and Europe, as well as New York, Denver, São Paulo, Perth and Melbourne. Now it is Sydney’s turn to host the pop-up storytelling exhibition that allows visitors to step into someone else’s shoes and discover their story, writes curator Kim Tao.
Opening in January as part of the Sydney Festival, A Mile in my Shoes has been developed in collaboration with the Empathy Museum, a series of participatory art projects that encourages people to view the world from a different perspective. The museum considers how empathy can transform our personal relationships and also inspire positive action around global challenges such as prejudice, conflict and inequality. As the first experiential arts space that fosters the skill of empathising, the Empathy Museum doesn’t have a permanent home; instead, its projects are travelling pop-up installations conceived by London-based artist and curator Clare Patey and produced by Artsadmin.
SHOES, MORE THAN ANY OTHER ITEM OF CLOTHING, take on the material imprint of their owners and reflect the places they have been. It is little wonder, then, that to wear someone else’s shoes is a deeply personal tactile experience. This sense of embodied connection lies at the heart of the museum’s upcoming outdoor exhibition A Mile in my Shoes, which invites visitors to walk a mile in the shoes of a stranger while listening to their migration story.
Empathy is often described as having the ability to see the world through another person’s eyes or to walk in their shoes. A Mile in my Shoes interprets this adage literally in the form of a roaming interactive exhibition housed in a giant shoebox, where visitors trade in their own footwear for those of a stranger, slip on some headphones and take a walk as the owner of the shoes shares a story about their life. Over the last five years, the exhibition has welcomed 50,000 visitors who have walked a mile in someone else’s shoes. In each city it visits, the Empathy Museum’s mobile shoe shop collects new stories, resulting in an evolving archive of audio portraits that explore both our differences and our common humanity.
Signals 133 Summer 2020–21
