Right Way to Nowhere
2026
Shoes
38 x 45 x 29 cm
All images © Fábio Colaço
2026
Shoes
38 x 45 x 29 cm
All images © Fábio Colaço
Right Way to Nowhere presents a pair of black formal shoes, devoid of any distinctive features, suspended from the ceiling as though it were the floor of a world turned upside down. Arranged to suggest the act of walking, with one shoe positioned slightly ahead of the other, they appear to move forward while remaining motionless, embodying a contradiction between movement and stillness, direction and destination.
The work enters into dialogue with Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual (1978), particularly the story of Percival Bartlebooth, who devotes fifty years of his life to a meticulously planned project whose ultimate purpose is to erase every trace of its own completion. His undertaking follows a precise set of rules and procedures, finding its very purpose in the cancellation of its results. This logic also resonates with the myth of Sisyphus, condemned to push a boulder endlessly to the top of a mountain, only to watch it roll back down to its starting point. While in Perec, discipline and repetition form part of a voluntary project designed to leave no trace, in the myth of Sisyphus, effort is imposed as an endless task. In both cases, the relationship between action, purpose and meaning is called into question.
By displacing an everyday object into an unexpected context, the work subverts not only its function but also the conventions that shape our perception of space and reality. The shoes, associated with formality, conformity and adherence to certain social norms, appear to follow an established path, even when the points of reference that sustain it have been literally inverted. What initially appears to be an act of walking becomes an absurd exercise in orientation, in which the existence of a direction does not necessarily imply the possibility of reaching a destination.
Between Bartlebooth’s methodical project and Sisyphus’s endless labour, the work identifies two distinct manifestations of the same contradiction: the persistence of action in the absence of an outcome. Rather than merely representing the futility of movement, Right Way to Nowhere questions the faith placed in systems of order, conventions and notions of progress that guide contemporary life. Through an apparently simple inversion, the work exposes the fragility of what we take for granted, suggesting, with irony, that we can follow every rule, move in the prescribed direction and still end up nowhere.
The work enters into dialogue with Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual (1978), particularly the story of Percival Bartlebooth, who devotes fifty years of his life to a meticulously planned project whose ultimate purpose is to erase every trace of its own completion. His undertaking follows a precise set of rules and procedures, finding its very purpose in the cancellation of its results. This logic also resonates with the myth of Sisyphus, condemned to push a boulder endlessly to the top of a mountain, only to watch it roll back down to its starting point. While in Perec, discipline and repetition form part of a voluntary project designed to leave no trace, in the myth of Sisyphus, effort is imposed as an endless task. In both cases, the relationship between action, purpose and meaning is called into question.
By displacing an everyday object into an unexpected context, the work subverts not only its function but also the conventions that shape our perception of space and reality. The shoes, associated with formality, conformity and adherence to certain social norms, appear to follow an established path, even when the points of reference that sustain it have been literally inverted. What initially appears to be an act of walking becomes an absurd exercise in orientation, in which the existence of a direction does not necessarily imply the possibility of reaching a destination.
Between Bartlebooth’s methodical project and Sisyphus’s endless labour, the work identifies two distinct manifestations of the same contradiction: the persistence of action in the absence of an outcome. Rather than merely representing the futility of movement, Right Way to Nowhere questions the faith placed in systems of order, conventions and notions of progress that guide contemporary life. Through an apparently simple inversion, the work exposes the fragility of what we take for granted, suggesting, with irony, that we can follow every rule, move in the prescribed direction and still end up nowhere.