I wear these shoes when I make paintings in my Sabotage series. At first, they serve a practical purpose: to keep me from getting dirty. Yet this type of shoe is traditionally associated with the working class—worn both on the job and in everyday life—and for that reason I incorporate them into the conceptual framework of the series. The inscription on them recalls Woody Guthrie’s guitar and its famous declaration: “This machine kills fascists.”

Fascism may already be latent in the very concept of the state. Democracy offers no absolute safeguard against it. What can resist it, perhaps, is worker organization: a collective force opposing centralized, authoritarian, and hierarchical power. To join a movement requires identifying with something beyond oneself—an act that might be understood as placing oneself in another’s shoes.

At the same time, all forms of organization demand a degree of conformity, and this too lies at the core of fascism. It is here that art becomes crucial. Art insists on absolute individuality and non-instrumentality, yet it is also communal; it creates forms of connection while resisting subsumption into rigid structures.