Cross Cultural Chairs

How people sit and are seated: an anthropology of chair design.

The anatomy of our bodies requires sitting; but do we design seats in the same way? Has our meaning of sitting been colonised by Modern design? And how is the diverse, social-cultural act of sitting itself reflected in this functional commodity?

In observing and analysing social and cultural differences through chairs from eight cultures in the most populated countries, Sicilian designer Matteo Guarnaccia went on a field research to portray each country, in collaboration with selected local design studios, to situate each cultural context into the form of a chair. This project diversifies the supposedly mundane parts of chair-culture and chair design, to open the conversation of identity, community and a reality divided into a global and local conglomerate expression through chairs.

Introduction Interviews by FormaFantasma and Aldo Cibic followed by contributed texts by Tulio Amarante, Ana Elena Mallet, Hisashi Ikai, Ayos Purwoaji, Shell Xu, Spandana Gopal, Alexandra Sankova and Wale Lawal.