Fukushima Shoes

Another exhibit in my collection of art inspired by the Fukushima nuclear disaster is a work titled “Healing Fukushima (Nanohana Heels)", currently displayed as a part of “Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoe” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (until March 1, see the video intro on the museum page and my report).

These shoes were co-created in 2012 by an artist and designer working under the pseudonym Sputniko! (I thought that this was a plucky Yoko-Ono-like grandma, but it turned out to be a 30-year-old assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab, Hiromi Ozaki) and a shoe designer Masaya Kushino, a person with the most Baroque imagination when it comes to creating shoes.

Masaya Kushino. Stairway to Heaven (2013).
Heaven? Nah. If I were Hermes, this would be
my footwear of choice for trips to Hades.

The Fukushima shoes are decorated with the flowers of nanohana, a kind of rapeseed, a plant that absorbs from the soil caesium-137 and strontium-90 and stores them in its stalks, but not its seeds. The idea is that the wearer of the shoes walks on the ground and the seeds, which are stored in a drum on each shoe, are deposited through the heel into the soil at every step. The plants grow and absorb the radioactive elements, and the contamination is cleared. A short movie displayed alongside the shoes demonstrates how the shoe is supposed to work.

Nanohana Heels in action (movie screenshot)

What to do about the fact that both caesium and strontium have 30-year half-life is still unclear, but then who said that art needs to be practical. In terms of audacity, originality, impracticality, and quixotry, this opus has no serious rivals at this exhibition.