In the bathroom, at school, at the cinema, as we eat, in the transport, at work. Our life goes from chair to chair. This was certainly not always like this and it doesn’t have to.
Looking at the well-known chairs like a foreigner (or an alien) would do, serves to visualize and evidence the current neocolonial context in which we find ourselves. The image of a person sitting on a chair can be understood as a symbol of the domestication of the body and the imposition of a foreign culture.
Not only are chairs dangerous to the human spinal cord, pelvic area and colon, but they’ve always have had an important role in processes of acculturation and colonization of the imaginary.
The word ‘Chair’ and the word cathedral share etymology, via Greek: kata (down) hedra (seat). Cathedrals were the most authoritative form church could invent. So somewhere in every chair there’s a cathedral, or a ceremonial throne.
The english word ‘Squat´ means to crouch with one’s knees bent and one’s heels close to one’s buttocks, but it also means to occupy, to settle in an uninhabited building or a piece of land. The way these two meanings are related to each other is our object of study.
In many ways, squatting is occupying uninhabited sites of ourselves. When you squat, your balls hang loose, your uterus descends freely. You start to acknowledge the smell of your own sex. When you become a regular squatter, you find a lot of new places to hang out, realize how unnecessary and harmful toilets are and experience a funny feeling each time urban furniture “tells” you where and how to seat.
Through a series of group exercises, we will intend to denaturalize the figure of the chair and reclaim the ancestral posture of the squatting to eat, defecate, study, give birth or recreate.
You can watch some of our activities in our YouTube Chanel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxg9BqyYEK0ixsz7HkOCmwg