For the sculptor, there's the chisel and the block of wood
or marble. For the poet, the pen and the paper. For the traveler, the wanderer,
he has his footwear and the world.
Art always creates, expresses, presents and most of the
time, generates a certain trace, produces a tangible “work of art”. Wandering,
however, leaves only footprints. Not totally though as traveling permits the
wanderer to discover cities, meet people, interact with strangers, and learn
cultures. In the process, he takes notes of these experiences, the history, the
stories attached to each city square or statue, a dish or a tradition, a legend
or a saying.
These are notes that both the wanderer and the footwear pick
up all throughout the journey, may it be through sandy or pebbled coasts,
cobbled roads or dusty ruins, a puddle of water or a sheep's path. The foot
directs, the footwear describes. The dialogue, the relationship between the two
defines the experience. Designs.
(“Redfoot” is such dialogue, the relationship between the
author and the footwear (a pair of red alpargatas bought from a street vendor
in Florence). “Wandering Redfoot” documents the journey of the foot and the red
alpargatas in various degrees of rest and reflection and re-creation.)
We were caught red-footed for the first time on a drizzly
late April morning walking through the length of the Place Massena in Nice
under the weight of the seven statues composing Jaume Plensa's Conversation a
Nice. The statues represent the seven continents in dialogue, particularly at
nighttime when they are lit in various, ever-changing colors. That day though,
back in their original white, the statues were in deep contemplative mode as
muted by the morning mist and the dark gray overcast.
On one foot, we thought that with technology, this
conversation among the continents is very much possible as facilitated
especially by the internet and telecommunications, and the growth and spread of
social networks. On the other, traveling and migration has also been a great
part in weaving dialogues among peoples and cultures, creating a web of
concrete relationships and deeper connections one step, one stranger, one city
at a time.
As it continued raining, we took hurried strides and took
refuge by the building behind the Fontaine du Soleil, where a statue of Apollo,
god of all the arts and patron of poetry, is surrounded by allegorical
sculptures of the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and Saturn. Apollo,
principally symbolized by the sun according to mythology, must have heard our
unspoken plight as the skies started to clear up as we made our way through the
souvenir shops, the open market riddled with stalls of flowers and plants and
the fish market, a few steps away from the sea.
And for some law that perhaps only Thales could understand
and fully explain, as soon as we reached the pebbled beach, the foot took off
to meet the water, and left me to rest a few feet away from the waltzing waves.
The sea must have been cold and the sun yet to wake up as the foot came back
and sat beside me and started to narrate a summary of our very first night in
Nice:
That night, after a rainy morning
of traveling from Milan to Ventimiglia to Nice, and looking for the hotel, and
an afternoon of scouring for lunch that led to an evening of scouring for
dinner, the foot rested its tired sole by the window of the hotel, looking over
the blinking lights of the restaurants, the sporadic reunions of compatriots,
the rains that have washed the city clean, all vacuumed into bins of garbage
collected by the city truck. The foot watched this scene, as if already a
ritual, a tradition, some sort of gathering. Everything was almost silenced
though by the glass that divided the room and the street. It had been a long
three to four months of organizing the foot's eclectic thoughts into a master's
thesis. The foot had somehow missed the chaos of the city, the spontaneity. And
it was for the first time, that the foot took me out of the plastic bag still
smelling of the Florence central market, and lined me by the ledge for airing
out. And as he looked at the cars lined up along the avenue like arrows all
leading toward the sea, he thought of the coming summer.
We left the beach just as Apollo started to spread its arms
over the city, there was a train to catch unfortunately. Passing by the cities
along the northern Cote D'Azur stretch, by then all awash in sunlight, the foot
had to take me off as it started to get uncomfortable. Finger slid in between
the toes, as if to brush off sand, as if to send the continents, the universe
some sort of communication, pulling all the remaining days of spring and
re-arranging Apollo's schedule, an invitation for a midsummer walk and some good old
conversation. The foot just couldn't wait to paint the northern coasts of the
other side of the Mediterranean red. // for Oasis Holidays
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is a worldwide-eyed wanderer currently based in Bangalore, India. You may follow his musings and journeys on this blog. "All Rover the World" chronicles his continuing travels wandering about the world and stumbling upon strangers.
