Medellín From the Ground Up.
There are cities you can photograph and cities you have to be introduced to.
Medellín feels like the latter.
For Touching Ground, photographer and director Lauren Luxenberg went looking beyond the postcard version of the Colombian city, working alongside Medellín skateboarder and creative Ronal Sanmartin to document it through the people who actually move through its streets.
PUMA came along for the ride.
The resulting project is ostensibly about the PUMA Suede, but thankfully, it doesn’t spend much time behaving like a sneaker campaign. Instead, Luxenberg and Sanmartin turn their attention towards Medellín itself: its skateboarders, families, neighbourhoods, rituals, friendships and the small pieces of daily life that tell you considerably more about a place than a landmark ever could.
At the centre of it all is the idea of roots.
Not the polished, retrospective kind. The real ones. Family. The street you grew up on. The people who knew you before anybody else cared who you were. The corner everyone meets at.
The neighbourhood shortcuts you don’t need Google Maps to find. The places that become part of you simply because you’ve walked through them a thousand times.
Skateboarding provides a particularly good way in.
A skateboarder knows a city differently. A staircase isn’t just a staircase. Concrete isn’t just concrete. Empty plazas, rails, ledges, slopes and forgotten pieces of urban planning become something else entirely. You start noticing the city at ground level.
Hence, Touching Ground.
Luxenberg and Sanmartin move between digital photography, analogue film, Super 8 and camcorder footage, giving the project the imperfect texture of something remembered rather than manufactured. Nothing feels overly cleaned up. That’s important. Medellín isn’t reduced to scenery for a pair of shoes.
The Suede simply exists amongst it.
Which, when you think about it, is probably the most convincing way to tell the story of a shoe like this anyway.
The PUMA Suede has spent decades being adopted rather than assigned. Athletes wore it. Then musicians. Artists. Skateboarders. Different cities and different generations took the same fairly simple object and made it mean something slightly different.
That’s how genuinely enduring pieces of clothing tend to survive. Not because somebody keeps telling us they’re iconic, but because people keep wearing them.
In Medellín, the Suede finds another life amongst a community already busy making its own culture.
And Touching Ground understands that the interesting story isn’t really the shoe.
It’s whose feet it’s on.
Contemporary art, underground cinema, live music, native food, vintage markets and a few other reasons to leave the house. The BASE CAST edit of Sydney this September.