Video of the Week – Your Shoes Are Rubbish

By Dan Hutton on September 25, 2014 in Video

Your Shoes Are Rubbish from Billy Turvey on Vimeo.

I recently got sent a link to a video about this little project.

The project is about the out of sight and out of mind legacy of the modern consumer. Taking the shoe as a prime example: What used to be a hand crafted item made to last and designed to be repairable, now spends an almost insignificant amount of time on the ground doing what it was made for.

As soon as the first component on a modern shoe fails, the pair is often discarded. The mass produced shoe is now essentially disposable. After you’ve finished with them they’re just another (two) piece(s) of rubbish that are likely to still be around long after your own body has decomposed; we’re all leaving behind ourselves a rubbish legacy.

With the development of plastics came a utopian promise to change the world, and change the world it has. Plastic has become so materially ingrained in our lives and environment that it’s becoming increasingly indistinguishable and inseparable from nature.

The guys behind the project took this as a starting point and set out to mine this plastic pollution, collecting rubbish from the west and the south coast of England and the banks of the river Thames. Following this they made a pair of shoes out of the rubbish that all our consumer goods are destined to become – a satirical critique of the legacy we consumers leave in our wake.

Far from suggesting we all wear shoes made from rubbish, the project is a talking point around which to stage a conversation about the consumerism game we’re all caught up in.