“In June ‘75, some architects, designers and artists came together to make unlikely objects in the courtyard of an old house in Milan. This was the first Global Tools Seminar, from Radical Design, a school with no permanent base. The theme: ‘The body and its constraints’. We wanted to take the tried and tested practice of technological, comfortable and functional design and contrast it with an array of archaic and dysfunctional designs. By short-circuiting the logical and the procedural, we made useless objects stemming from our reflection and thoughts on the certainties of the project, on the need to maintain a dialogue between art and design, on the body as a tool and objects as introductory prostheses, and on a creative reconstruction of the relationship between form and function. Some of the products of the seminar were: tubular glasses made to look into one’s own eyes, bracelets which bind, clogs made for walking uphill, elastic clothes for people joined together, and these shoes made for an obligatory frontal relationship. Experimentally made of clay, they suggest the fusion of two separate shoes which prevent walking and oblige the two people who wear them to an inevitable but regulated promiscuity of bodies and looks. In 2006 the Biennale of Ceramics in Contemporary Art gave me the chance to use clay to recreate this apparently useless object. I wanted to bring back the spirit, the intention and the subtle charm of an unquestionably functional artefact from that project which we did thirty years ago with Alessandro Mendini, Davide Mosconi and Nazareno Noia.” Franco Raggi

Scarpe vincolanti is shown in room 13.