Feet and Vulnerability

The shoe sits at an uncanny ontological threshold: partly belonging to the earth, partly a piece of our own bodies. It’s an object that separates us from the earth while also opening up a world to us. - What do shoes do? — Randy Laist @aeonmag

for Josanna, an assemblage: feet, vulnerability, footwear.

I had a thought about feet; how it opens the world but at the same time, it’s intimate and private.

Because the things we carry give us shape. Leaving home, Part three, Vestoj

01

The quarter-inch of material between my feet and the ground would separate me from the physical earth but, in making the world accessible, would create a world too. As Shantideva, the 8th-century Buddhist monk observed, ‘with the leather soles of just my shoes, it is as though I covered the whole earth’ in leather. — What do shoes do? by Randy Laist, Aeon

04

The shoe sits at an uncanny ontological threshold: partly belonging to the earth, partly a piece of our own bodies. It’s an object that separates us from the earth while also opening up a world to us. — What do shoes do? by Randy Laist, Aeon

05

savouring walks, touching the soil, vibrating, tectonic, vulnerable — Trinity Yeung

06

Vulnerability is intimacy — Samin Norsat on grief, gratitude and connection

02

An initial impression might well be that there is no more ordinary and unremarkable consumption object than shoes. — Shoes and Self, Assoc. for Consumer Research

03

OUTSIDE THE TEMPLE: GOLD AND SILVER SANDALS

The sandals which will make a female of me belong to many women. The front of the temple entrance hides itself behind shoe-racks. Visitors enter barefooted, leaving behind the dung, dried frogs, spilled petrol and ketchup traces of the streets. Hundreds of pairs of gold and silver sandals wait here for the women who will re-emerge from the vigil with the taste of basil leaf and sugar in their deep-breathing mouths and carpet fibres between their toes. The sandals, gold and silver, seem all alike. How can the women tell them apart? They do tell them apart. It is as if each pair sings an intimate mantra to its owner, audible only to her. One day I too shall return to expectant slippers that stack up like the moon and the stars outside a marble building; one day I shall not have to wear child’s shoes. — Investigation of Past Shoes, Vahni Capildeo, Vestoj