Michael Blum created My Sneakers, in association with "Ruangrupa", an artists' collective based in Jakarta. The video starts with a shot of the artist's shoes ; he walks while the project is explained by a voiceover. He wants to find the origins of his Nike sneakers and find out more about their history, a quest that leads him to Jakarta, Indonesia.

It soon becomes clear that it will complicated for him to precisely locate the origins of the shoes, given the amount of underground sweatshops established in Indonesia. The artist follows the manufacturing networks back to the factory of origin, but then has great difficulty in obtaining what he calls his "visa for Nikeland". The story follows a chronological progression : the construction of the video seems to stem from the research results, as though Michael Blum was seeking to make the spectator a witness to the investigation and discover along with him certain aspects that are among the most cynical of the capitalist world. He finally manages to locate the factory and question the workers. Through their testimonies, he evokes the organisation of labour : non-stop production, manufacture of products of different brands in the same factory... Thanks to the information he is able to glean, he progressively reconstitutes the story of his shoes. Finally, he focuses more intently on the production process and critiques the global organisation of labour. His investigation, based on a deliberately naive postulate, is finally transformed into a geo-political examination of the global economy.

Like a logbook, the video documents the various phases of his journey. The artist's approach is similar to both historical research and a police investigation. The last shot repeats the shot from the introduction to the film, with vehicles on the road superimposed, concluding the journey. Now that the objective of his journey has been achieved, Michael Blum decides to put his shoes back into circulation. He abandons them on the side of a road, awaiting their second life.

In 2010, echoing My Sneakers, Michael Blum repeated the same experience after buying shoes of the same brand for his daughter, in the video Capri in Tangerang (Her Sneakers). Almost ten years separates the two videos made in Jakarta, but the working conditions imposed by the Western companies remain the same.

Priscilia Marques
Translated by Anna Knight