ANOTHER SHOE FOR ANOTHER LIFE

The crisis in shoe making is worsening. The construction of shoes, old and new, conflicts with established patterns of behavior and even more with the new ways of life that we are seeking. The result is a dismal and sterile ambience in our footwear.

In the older shoe stores, the racks display row after row of cheaply made heeled marshmallows. On streets the pleasures of walking have been commercialized and corrupted by tourism. In these shoes social relations become impossible. The newly designed shoes have only two all-pervasive themes: low-cost production and comfort — an impoverished expression of bourgeois contentment, lacking any sense of play.

To meet the need to rapidly construct enough shoes for entire cities, cemeteries of synthetic leather are being built in which masses of the population are condemned to walk  in boredom. What is the point of all the extraordinary technical inventions the world now has at its disposal if the conditions are lacking to derive any benefit from them, if they contribute nothing to leisure, if imagination is absent?

We demand adventure. Not finding it on earth, some want to seek it on the moon. We, however, are committed to changing life here on earth. We intend to create shoes, new shoes, breaking the laws that prevent the development of meaningful ventures in life and culture. We are at the dawn of a new era, and we are already attempting to sketch out the image of a happier life, of a unitary pair of shoes — a pair of  shoes designed for pleasure.

Our domain is thus the shoe workshop, the natural expression of a collective creativity, capable of incorporating the creative energies liberated by the decline of a culture based on individualism. In our opinion the traditional arts will have no role in the creation of the new environment in which we want to live.

We are in the process of inventing new techniques; we are examining the possibilities offered by existing shoes; and we are making models and plans for future shoes. We know that we need to avail ourselves of all the new technological inventions, and we know that the future shoe constructions we envisage will have to be flexible enough to respond to a dynamic conception of life, which means creating our own surroundings in direct relation to continually changing modes of behavior.
We thus have a social conception of the shoe. We are opposed to the notion of the jogging shoe in which the injection of facile gels and  pseudo-technology into heels inevitably reduces people’s direct relations and collective activities. To create a close connection between surroundings and behavior, collaborative shoe fabrication is indispensable. Those who think that synthetic and recycled shoes are going to break up the shared life of the contemporary shoe have little understanding of humanity’s true needs. In contrast to the jogging shoe idea favored by most modern shoe makers, we envisage expanded shoes in which the layout of soles and heels will be replaced by a continuous spatial construction elevated above the ground, including clusters of movement as well as new functionality (permitting changes in use according to the needs of the moment). Since all shoes in the functional sense of the term, will pass over the ground or up in the sky, the concept of the middle can be eliminated. The multitude of different ways of traversing of which the shoe is composed will form a complex and vast social practice. Far from a return to nature — from the notion of idly strolling in a park, as solitary aristocrats once did — we see in such immense shoe-constructions the possibility of overcoming nature and of regulating the climate, light and sounds with these different shoe-forms in accordance with our desires.

Do we intend this to be a new functionalism, which would promote an even greater idealization of utilitarian life? It should not be forgotten that once functions are established, they are followed by play. For a long time now, shoe construction has become a game of space and ambiences. The contemporary shoe lack ambiences. We, on the contrary, want to make more conscious use of ambiences so that they correspond to all our needs.

If the project we have roughly outlined here risks being taken for a fantastic dream, we insist on the fact that it is feasible from the technical standpoint, desirable from the human standpoint, and indispensable from the social standpoint. The increasing dissatisfaction of the whole of humanity will reach a point where we will all be compelled to execute projects for which we possess the means, projects that will contribute to the realization of a richer and more fulfilled life.

http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/3.constant.htm