The History of Sitting
lobby arkheia
Variations on the Chair in Mexico
Sitting seems to be a simple gesture, yet few actions reveal so much about a culture as the way bodies are deployed in space. The height of a seat, its materials, its proximity to the ground, the posture it demands or the context in which it appears all speak to forms of coexistence and ideas on rest, labor, authority, intimacy and time.
This exhibition encourages us to see Mexican design through this apparently banal yet profoundly cultural gesture.
Through a selection of twentieth and twenty-first century pieces from the MUAC design collection, this exhibition presents a genealogy of the chair in Mexico. This is not a linear history of furniture, but a dense tangle of appropriations, translations and reinventions. Here, the chair is not a functional object but a place of convergence between tradition, modernity, memory and experimentation.
In Mexico, modernity did not emerge through a negation of folk or vernacular forms, but through dialogue with them. Designers, architects and artisans found a material and corporeal intelligence in the butaque, the equipal, the silla de palo or the heirs of the hammock that could inform new modern explorations. Rather than limit itself to styles or authors, this exhibition reflects on how objects shape everyday life and how design actively participates in the construction of cultural identities. Each chair on display has its own vision of habitation and the body: some evoke community and connection with the earth, others represent the aspirations of industrialization, modernization and cosmopolitanism and still others criticize the nationalist narratives that left their mark on much of the history of Mexican design.
The History of Sitting is also an invitation to see the objects we use each day through different eyes. In Mexico, sitting has never only meant occupying a place: it is a way of understanding one’s context and the larger world.
Curatorship: Ana Elena Mallet
