The CHAIRING Project is an ongoing exploration of reading chairs. While investigating the different qualities of chairs, such as their sound, smell and taste I am slowly moving from the real towards the imaginary object. This is a series of smaller experiments.
Every furniture designers wet dream is it to design a signature chair, so the chlichée goes... What a great opportunity to strip down its qualities layer by layer.
Joseph Kosuth's piece One and Three Chairs marked the beginning of The Chairing Project. Next to the real object, its photograph and definition, I aim to look for its sound, smell, taste and more. Moving from the real towards the imaginary object.
One & no chairs is a playful exploration of the invisible qualities of a chair. By combining conceptual art and absurdism—using elements like repetition from the Theatre of the Absurd—I am going back and forth in between the metaphysical and pataphysical space, grasping what a chair is.
After crafting myself an ear, nose and tongue, and hooking them up to my sensory recorder, I am ready to collect sound, smell and taste of chairs.
Sound
Smell
Taste
Recording the sound of falling, ringing, touching chairs. Then distilling parts of chairs to harvest their smell. And finally baking the taste of chairs into waffles.
Grab a Chair aims to challenge the viewer's perception on what a chair consists of and offers them to grasp a single invisible quality of a chair at a time: its sound, its smell and its taste.
Calling, talking,
listening to chairs...
Listening to the actual sound of a chair in different environments slowly became more absurd the more detached the scenery became from what you can hear. In The Sound Of.f I am exploring what one can imagine hearing just by setting a scene through my wording, gradually playing with redundancy and contradiction to take it to the extreme.
While searching for a deeper meaning in collecting a chairs scent, I came across Joseph Beuys' work Fat Chair. It not only pointed me to a known technique used by perfumers to encapsulate scent molecules in fat, but it would also add a care factor to the project: the healing power of affection, symbolized by fat.
wounded
treated chair
Having noticed the chair's cry for help, I decided to show it respect by treating the wounded areas with an odourless fat that provides warmth and connects to Beuys's beliefs about affection. At this point, I don't think this experiment lives up to his ideals.
Digging deeper into invisible qualities, I decided to introduce a playful manner of smelling chairs: a chair memory game! How many chair pairs can you smell?
Play became more and more of a way to express my intentions. Balancing humour and seriousness, not coming clean whether I mean what I propose. This is the realm that I feel comfortable in. Welcome lick chair dices.
But the idea of caring stuck with me. Mierle Laderman Ukeles Manifesto for Maintenance Art and her maintenance performances became an inspiration to keep on dwelling on the subject of care and maintenance. Maybe the chair reveals something about its taste by caring about it?
I consider Chaairs! to be the most important exploration of them all so far. It asks patience from the audience. Watching me taking care of three different chairs, taking the time to really give them a good clean, before taking an unexpected turn. This short film is supposed to challenge the audience, to evoke, to provoke a reaction, to make them think, and rethink. Or maybe to just make them laugh and provide good entertainment.
But one could definetely also argue that by cleaning the chair, I rob it from all its experiences, erasing all its memories, its past. So, maybe this is not caring at all?
One result of this project was the TASTE-SMELL box, providing a selection of care tools to harvest the taste and smell of things.
Every good wood-workshop needs a sexy calendar. That is the stereotype, right? The Lapdance Chalendar is entertainment for furniture designers!
The chairness runway became a gag once I started collecting all the different department's chairs that its students would use on a daily basis. Then it was time to show them off! Enjoy!
