Extra Soles
2003 / 2008
5 minute video with audio
original footage shot on digital video
Extra Soles are witness to interventions that happen on pavements in the city of Cape Town. Various states of being forcibly intersect here: exhaustion and ‘pure grit’ with day-dreaminess and paranoia, hard-hitting reality and moments of fictitious marvel. Unglamorous, unknown legends are momentarily made manifest, not unlike the Extra Soles myth.
The intervention involves anonymous people posing as extras in a movie, wearing working clothes and sporting soles embossed with encouraging messages. They walk in and out of puddles and imprint the pavement fleetingly with their messages. One reads: Rocco says Only you can©, another: Archie says Only you can©, and another Cindy says Only you can©.
The fiction is filmed by a disenchanted documenter (only partially seen in the collision scene), who discovers these messages, and thinks they are mythical and worth recording.
extras
Archie
Cindy
Rocco
directed by Bridget Baker
director of Photography Ed Young
final edit by Ronette van der Walt (2008)
original edit by Ed Young (2003)
audio extracted from Dziga Vertov’s Entuziazm (Simfonija Donbassa) (1930)
shot on location in Cape Town, South Africa
Strand Concourse, Civic Centre, Thibault Square
location scouts Caery Wiehan and Emil Gertz
production assistance Gregg Smith and Carmin Lakin
produced by the RAIN Artists’Initiatives Network, Very Real Time artist residency and Official BB Projects
© images Bridget Baker