In World 91, an ecologically minded generation of thinkers emerged adopted mushrooms as their non-human spiritual guides. Fungi have gradually become the centre of every aspect of culture – including shoes.
The customer of the FootStool shoe service places their foot into a mycelial medium to create an imprint, and then the medium grows their personalised footwear. The front of this double-sided tag records the date when their shoes will be ‘ripened and ready for harvest’. The reverse side is an invitation for the customer to complete the service by ‘revesting’ their shoes, when they are worn out, at Trembling Merulius Revestment Park. ‘Revest’ means returning material to the soil to become part of the natural world again. The tag, which will also eventually biodegrade, is left as a marker of where the revested shoes were placed into the ground.
When the tag spins in the wind, the images start to merge to create the impression of shoe and ground happening at the same time, representing the natural cycles that sit at the heart of the World’s culture.
This Exploration was contributed by Elly Platt, Talia Hussain and Martin Benes (located in the UK), developed from a World contributed by Suzanne Rowland, using a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence which allows others to share and adapt the work in any medium and for any purpose, providing that they credit the authors and share their material using the same Creative Commons licence.
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