SIT DOWN AND FEEL
One of humanity’s most important contributions, and one that supports, literally and often to the extreme, our choice not to move, is the chair. Disregarding the hip joint’s capacity for permanent movement, we adopt from an early age a sitting posture that in adulthood can account for an average of 7 hours of every day, according to studies by experts in workplace ergonomics, who also recommend changing positions from time to time, lest we begin to take root. Our body spends so much time in a chair that the challenge for designers has been to create one with a backrest and seat that merge with the body to unload its weight, distributing it over four legs. The process of imagining, recreating, developing, and producing a new chair is summarized in each iconic model that scholars of the history of design have placed on the timeline of humanity —which since the industrial revolution seems to spend increasingly more time seated— and of a profession exploding with endless creativity and rife with proposals for furniture that contradicts, complies with, reformulates, and varies the possibilities of our bodily actions when we stop moving around to rest, find ourselves, feel, and sit down.
Seated we concentrate on specific tasks that require stillness and attention, including stopping to do nothing. Seated we eat and discharge our weight and excrement; seated we are carried along by an effort that is not our own, transported on wheels or in various seats installed in vehicles that shorten distances. Seated we occupy —expressing our intent to stay more than a few minutes (as if sedated and calm) the place we choose or are assigned— which some will experience as a position and others as a throne (depending on the training that each sedentary person has been given with respect to the meaning of life).
THE COMPETITION
In honor of this piece of furniture —not to be taken for granted, given its infinite possibilities for materialization and because it provides us with so many opportunities to experiment from our sedentary human condition and creative profession through the use of reusing different materials—, we have launched an alliance with the Colombian company, Pinturas Tito Pabón, and with support from organizations and individuals who trust in the fruits of our proposals and concrete actions, a competition to design a chair made from Andean bamboo (Chusquea Scandens), open to creatives from around the world and in which the best international and Colombian proposals will be awarded.
