My Feet are My Wings
One of the first photography exhibits that I curated when I working as
coordinator at the Alternative Space Exhibits FOTOCAFE along with the
photo journalist Edgar Romero; director of the Free Images association;
was a show we titled 24 from 24. Twenty-four images were taken from
the family albums of ex-archbishop of San Salvador Oscar Arnulfo
Romero, along with photographs from the news archives taken during the
beginning of the war in El Salvador, around 1980. The inauguration was
held on March 24, 2004.
The photograph that we used for the invitations and posters, was one taken from
one of the building’s rooftop, close to the General Gerardo Barrios civic
plaza in El Salvador, an aerial shot that recorded an immense mountain
of shoes covering the avenue and part of the plaza after a stampede of
thousands of parishioners congregated in front of the metropolitan
cathedral the day of the archbishop's funeral, an image that without a
doubt went around the world and remained engraved in the imaginary collective. In my case, I was hardly 11 years old at the time and
lived in a very popular area on the outskirts of the capital. I
remember my grandmother very closely following the radio news of the
funeral procession when, in clear transmission, the first shots and
shouts were heard. Hours later my neighbor, Chamba, a young man of
about 25 years, arrived to our house. He was pale, dirty, drenched in
sweat and crying like a boy, trying to tell my grandmother between
sobs what was happening. I watched in surprise, for never in my short
life had I seen a man cry. Yet, the detail that I remember most of
that moment was that Chamba was barefoot--without shoes--except for a
half torn sock on one foot. Though it seems incredible, in those days
he worked for ADOC, the most important shoe factory in the region.
When I saw that photograph, all the memories rushed back into my mind
and I knew it was to be the image to promote the exhibit.
Some months ago while reading a newspaper, I came across an image very
similar to that just described, only that in this case it was of a
mountain of shoes left by people who had fled from a bomb attack in
Iraq. This can also be compared with images like the mountain of
shoes that remained after the Jewish Holocaust. At the end, it seems
that history takes care of reminding us from time to time that some
things just don't change.
"I have seen a shinbone and a thighbone end up in a sandal," someone
told me while talking of the exhumations, "families remembering their
dead by the shoes that were wore the day they were assassinated." I
also heard one time that energy enters through the upper part of the
body--the head--and exits through the feet. Perhaps it is because of
this that often we see cadavers whose shoes have been thrown off
during a brutal accident and are later found meters from the body.
My Feet are my Wings is a collective of photographs in which exists an
analogy between the object and the human being, the object as live
matter, capable of evoking feelings and sensations, capable of passing
on to us a large amount of information left in it, contained by the
energy of the people who participated in its making and those who will
then make use of it. The object is a symbol of power, a symbol of
belonging, of tenacity, of status, of style, of necessity, history,
the beginning and the end. The object gives testimony to space and
time.
In certain cultures the shoe is viewed as a fetish, an object that
incites or increases sexual desire. In Ancient China, for example, the
women used to squeeze into tiny shoes because feminine small feet were
considered very attractive. I imagine that these women reached the
point of turning the practice into an instrument of torture, torture
that the contemporary western woman seems to have not abandoned by
wearing high heels for their pretext of elegance. There are people who
believe that much can be said about a person by looking at his or her
shoes. By the color, the shape, how well the shoe is taken care of,
its material, this object-the shoe-reveals details about its owner in
an unsuspicious way.
In a certain way, this series is also a poetic, nostalgic work. When I
was a boy, the economy did not treat my family very well, and owning a
pair of shoes was something of extraordinary luck. Generally, they
weren't the shoes that one loved to have, but they complied with my
mother's expectations of durability. One of my most recurring dreams
was to see me arrive home with boxes and boxes of new shoes. Converse
All Stars of every color. I remember perfectly the smell of the new
canvas, the rubber sole, waking in the morning with this sensation
still so alive. The first thing I did was search for them under my
bed. Obviously, the only thing I found was my regular shoes, ugly and
sceptical, hard by themselves but that my memory now reproduces with a
beauty that causes much emotion, an emotion that is extended to the
sight of abandoned shoes buried in the road or tangled in the
telephone pole cables. I always pick these shoes up when I can and
take them to my studio hoping that at some moment they will talk to me
and tell me their story as I get ready to photograph them.
Some months ago, I went with my best friend to visit his father that
lives outside the city. He asked me to accompany him because he knew
that I was taking photographs of shoes, and his father had a lot of
pairs for me to shoot. What I found was the history of his family
contained in hundreds of pairs of shoes placed in high wooden shoe
cupboards that stretched from the floor to the ceiling, made with his
own hands he explained. Moreover, there were pairs accumulated in the
corners, under the bed and in those sacks that are used for storing
basic grains. He told me that he never threw the shoes away and that
there were at least some fifty years in age among them all, those from
his children and those from his wife. In effect, there were styles
from other periods, fashions from other times, models that had become
obsolete, very outdated but that time and dust have redressed with
great beauty.
Moreover, My Feet are my Wings involves a dialogue with emblematic
images of art history like Charlie Chaplin's ankle boots served on a
table, Robert Mapplethorpe’s tap shoes, the famous oil paintings of
worn out ankle boots by Vince Van Gogh, or the boots that end in toes
by Rene Magritte. I intend to talk about what is happening and has
happened through my visual, personal, social and artistic experience,
principally making use of photography but also of installation, object
art, and video.
There are certainly shoes found that are true pieces of art. There's
no more need than to change their context and take notice of the rare
idea that our feet very well can arrive to become our wings.
