You might not know this, but I’m a bit of a bandit for a cheap Jack shop. The notion of buying a lifetime’s supply of cotton tips for a couple of dollars—in three colour-ways, no less—gets me off to no end and this obsession with bargain stores follows me wherever I travel. When I would make my fortnightly pilgrimage to Tati, the store that sells both everything and nothing in Paris’ insalubrious Barbès-Rouchechouart, I would have to encounter a legion of street hagglers, most of whom appeared as if their faces were melting off à la a Salvador Dalì painting.

Contraband and counterfeit Marlboro and Legend cigarettes were their wares, along with shady jewellery, watches and no doubt black-market harvested organs. However, the most enterprising of the lot was a Senegalese man who would push around a shopping trolley, its back tied with electrical wire to the outer frame, with hot coals resting in a little tray fashioned from aluminium foil. It looked a little like this:

He would roast corn-on-the-cob on his makeshift grill, decorated in his printed robes, wearing his sensible black comfort sandals. I never bought anything from him but I always nodded in acknowledgment. He probably thought I wanted to score heroin.

Frankfurt-born, American artist, Mike Bouchet has been as enterprising with his latest design: a sun lounge made from a shopping trolley. Some people call them their homes, other furniture. The sun lounge was presented by Cumulus Studios at Design Miami/Basel 2011.

Now please excuse me, I have some roadkill to roast on my ghetto barbecue.

 

I do believe there’s more for you to read: