Walter Thaler (IT) at Rudolf Scheer & Söhne, Makers of Custom Shoes

Since 1816, the finest leather has been fashioned with handcrafted precision into perfectly formed footwear for a discerning clientele at the makers of custom shoes Rudolf Scheer & Söhne. The work is carried out here with the simplest of tools, but for that, with all the more know-how and an almost total absence of machinery. That has nothing to do with nostalgia, but with the simple fact that no machine is capable of producing shoes of this quality. When the South Tyrolean artist and designer Walter Thaler visited Sheer’s workshop (which is not open to the public), he was overwhelmed: by the smell of leather and glue, the rhythm of the shoemakers’ pounding hammers, the unusually relaxed approach to the time factor, and the almost sacred feeling of the storage rooms for the leather and the wooden shoe lasts. It is Thaler’s wish to make it possible for the visitors to the Passionswege to experience all of these impressions themselves. In his multimedia and equally multisensory installation, the various elements come together and join to form a composition that makes one feel the cosmos of Scheer & Söhne.