FOOTPRINT; FOUR ITINERARIES
This amazing and original book is something of a global/time travel walking tour with anti-colonialism, land rights, and activist art among its many subtexts. —Lucy R. Lippard
Footprint puts the politics back into walking, linking it to a poetics of marking. … in her dazzlingly diverse and pedagogically irresistible stories, footprints are the measure of migration. … A brilliant essay in eco-poetics, engagingly therapeutic for a culture whose sedentarism has left feet dragging behind. —Paul Carter, author of The Road to Botany Bay and Professor of Design (Urbanism), RMIT University, Melbourne
Footprint: Four Itineraries takes the footprint for a walk—to the Himalayas, the American southwest, to Arnhem Land and the moon, through monuments, prehistoric sites, sidewalks, and paintings, alongside artists, cartographers, surveyors and trackers, hesitating at revolutionary debate and solitary reverie, waylaid by war and land claims, sniffing greed and curiosity, recognizing both falter and fit, moving stealthily and boldly—to test the lasting power of this very material metaphor.
The book probes the long history of the footprint’s manifestation in the human imagination. It has signified mobility and occupation, inquiry and imperialism, absence and presence, trace, and impact. As a metaphor, it is ubiquitous and oddly self-evident. The book’s four itineraries trace the contradictory forensic evidence offered by the footprint’s many appearances. How can that dreamy print of your sole in the sand also signify that the planet is dying? When did a lithe mobile residue become a leaden artifact? Stories of footprints testify to colonialism, imperialism, and suppression but woven through them are histories of desire, persistence, mobility, and of lightness. In taking you on a series of journeys to understand why and what it means for our future, Footprint: Four Itineraries asks if it is yet possible to tread lightly on our world.
Subramaniam’s beautiful and brilliant work is itself an enigmatic imprint made of words and images that call out impacts, dwell in a temporality, follow a footprint’s humble claim…into the glitchy heart of the real, performing the weight of a world riven with the horror and generativity of ambition and still standing. —Kathleen Stewart, author of Ordinary Affects, Professor Emerita, University of Texas, Austin.
…a fascinating untangling of the metaphors and meanings accrued around the marks made by feet.——Clare Qualmann, Associate Professor, University of East London and Co-Founder, Walking Artists Network
Intellectually omnivorous and playful——Charles Zerner, Cohn Professor of Environmental Studies Emeritus, Sarah Lawrence College