Shoe Shop is an anthology and an experiment in imagining different paths, speaking in different tongues – on Africa, movement, public art, migration, beauty: considering an innate humanity. The book has been shaped to create a space for transformation and fluidity, for care, and for the sole pleasure of movement. It is a site for loitering, waiting, but also for doubt and reserving a space to enquire. The book begins with the struggle with the ideas that surround public art in South Africa. Public space remains difficult. Historically, ‘land’ is the point of original trauma and injustice. Today still, it is the glaring inequality of the geopolitical landscape that stands as testimony of a continuing structural and social segregation. The hard social realities and the untransformed landscape of apartheid have been addressed in various ways by artists and citizens. Perhaps it is time to rethink and imagine space from the perspective of the passers-by, of people walking and moving through space with their feet on the ground – negotiating, wearing, casting off, at other times weaving through, ideological territories of belonging as dictated by notions of nationality, raceor gender. The idea of migration in South Africa is of particular significance. It would be close to impossible to find a single individual whose history and self-definition are not related to some form of migration – from roving peoples, settlers and trekkers, to the more recent realities of the Group Areas Act and forced removals. Contemporary waves of emigration and immigration have in recent years turned South African urban centres into truly cosmopolitan and pan- African places. Literal and theoretical notions addressed in the book start with feet, physicality and shoes, moving to real and imagined movements, using invented maps, possible routes, dreams and ideas about the future. The Shoe Shop reader looks at the arts, particularly photography, cinema and literature. This book exists as a bridge between the project, Migration & Media, which started in 2006 in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) and its last iteration in Bamako (Mali) in 2011, and an evolving Shoe Shop exhibition and festival to be held in greater Johannesburg in May 2012, which will address physicality and movement as literal and conceptual spaces.