Christchurch artist Jack Carden has gone viral for taking this shopping trolley on an epic journey through New Zealand. Video / @pamiathat
A young Christchurch artist has taken a shopping trolley on an epic journey across mountain ranges and beaches after a dream inspired him to create what he calls “a kind of performance art”.
Jack Carden is 21, and studies fine art in Christchurch. With more than 200,000 followers on Instagram and 900,000 on TikTok he’s no stranger to going viral – but his latest video has people calling for him to become New Zealand’s newest tourism ambassador.
The video shows Carden taking a shopping cart from a supermarket, as a David Attenboroug-esque voiceover plays in the background. The voice-over describes the process of returning a shopping cart as “the ultimate litmus test as to whether a person is capable of self-governing”.
In short, it says that returning a shopping cart is easy and convenient, and something everyone knows is the right thing to do – but there are no consequences for not doing it.
“Therefore the shopping cart presents itself as the apex example of whether a person will do what is right without being forced to do it.”
As this audio plays, Carden films himself pushing a trolley from a first-person perspective, initially just down the road. Then the scene switches to the top of a snowy mountain, through mud and over gravel, into a lake and across a beach before finally being returned to the supermarket – back in its rightful place.
Speaking to the Herald, Carden said surprisingly the idea for the video came to him in a dream. He had seen the voice-over on another social media site, and couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Christchurch artist Jack Carden. Photo / Supplied
“I told my flatmate that morning, I was like, ‘I’ve got this idea for a video’ and it’s a really hard sell because you just, you tell someone that you want to push your cart around - it doesn’t sound like an entertaining video.”
But the pair persevered and loaded the cart into the back of Carden’s car.
“We just drove me and my flatmate, basically up, we drove towards Mount Hutt - that’s the, the snow mountain, and then we also drove to the opposite direction.”
He said the video took a couple of days to film and the pair were scouting locations that had a “Lord of The Rings-esque” look to it.
The hardest terrain to cross was the snow, he said and at one point the pair had to stop as a snowstorm struck and carry the trolley as the wheels refused to move any further.
“It was a dense fog, we couldn’t really see anything. We lost our bearings to some extent and the trolley would just not move on the snow. It was just sinking deep into it, and that was genuinely quite a difficult moment where we physically couldn’t push the trolley or pull it even and we had to carry it.”
Gravel and train tracks also presented a problem.
“Pushing a trolley around a supermarket is hard enough for me. Pushing a trolley on gravel is impossible.”
He said although the cart didn’t have any busted wheels when the journey began he suspects they’re all quite wobbly now.
Vita Molyneux is a Wellington-based journalist who covers breaking news and stories from the capital. She has been a journalist since 2018 and joined the Herald in 2021.
