Living Room_NeuS
by Neuköllner Salon e. V.
Take a Seat (Neuköllner Salon e.V.)
How do we furnish our homes today? In our own four walls, mass-produced IKEA furniture meets individuals with their own behaviours and expectations of the furnishings. The table is scratched where you usually sit and the sofa is particularly worn out in only one place. Uniformity meets unpredictability, and so even the standardised chair ends up as a unique. Along those reflections on the relationship between mass and the individual, a great variety of chairs can be found in the living room with the adjacent garden. They ask about their origin and purpose - but you can also sit on them.
The Monobloc is probably one of the best-selling pieces of furniture worldwide. This is due, among other things, to the name-giving production process. Thanks to the injection moulding process "in one piece" (French: monobloc), a single chair can be produced in less than two minutes. In addition to the low production costs, the Monobloc also convinces with its functionality: the chair is light, stackable and weatherproof. Thus, the plastic chairs, which were developed by Henry Massonet in 1972, are particularly common in gardens and on terraces. Since he was unable to register a patent for the highly efficient manufacturing process, the Monobloc exists today in various versions, which differ slightly in design. However, the curved armrests, the deep seat and the chair legs that are "folded" inwards, allowing them to be stacked on top of each other, remain characteristic. Like hardly any other piece of furniture, the Monobloc oscillates between design object and mass-produced item, art and kitsch. It can be found in the Vitra Design Museum as well as in every Schrebergarten in the republic. When the balcony is decluttered or one of the chair legs, brittle from the weather, breaks off, the overlooked design classic often finds itself at the side of the road.
Here it joins the ranks of other pieces of furniture that have become unwelcome and are discarded on the pavement in the hopes that they will find a second life (or simply out of convenience). It is not uncommon for such a chair to end up in a WG kitchen, a hip café or a spontaneous sitting circle at the Späti. Just as often, however, they will rot away in ever-growing piles of rubbish until the city cleaning service takes mercy on them. Regardless of whether it's an IKEA model, a Baroque armchair or a Monobloc: even if the chair was part of a interior just a few moments before - as soon as it's on the street, the upholstery looks stained, the lacquer cracked and the legs wobbly.
This raises the question of where a chair should be and where it can be. Outside or inside? Doesn't the chair ultimately care? There are chairs that do not fit into the general understanding at all and yet fulfill the same function. The high seat is such a phenomenon. It is located in nature and serves the hunters for a better understanding of nature and its creatures. It is meant for sitting for a long time and envelops the user - it is both protection from nature and a starting point for an attack. It is immobile and provides a directed field of vision. But what if he suddenly finds himself in the living space? When he is asked by his namesakes what he is?
Berlin-based photographer Josephine Knoll has been collecting the chairs she comes across since 2018 and capturing them on the Instagram account @therearemanychairs. With many of the images, an involuntary comedy unfolds upon closer inspection. How did the chairs get there? Who beat them up so badly? Why were they taken out onto the street? What did the rooms look like in which they stood? And where are they now?
Anna Mirkin is not interested in depicting the sober reality of the Monoblocs. She transports the chairs into abstract worlds. Weightless, they float in front of pastel-coloured horizons and appear like the platonic ideal of garden furniture. The Monobloc, as a piece of furniture that is anchored in the collective subconscious, is brought to the surface as an alienated new thing. Henry Massonet's idea of mass production meets an individual and their concrete and personal ideas of what can be.
Valentin Cafuk goes to nature at the thought of the chair, and yet back home. Flachsitz is a combination of a hunting perch and a garden chair that he created in Lockdown 2020. Here, the chair provides a field of vision that allows or prevents a focused perspective on what is in front of you through the flaps. It moves between foreclosure (of something) and outlook (on something).
Tim B. Boroewitsch negotiates the relationship that develops in between furniture and its owners. He crawled over the brown-colored sofa as a toddler, and countless memories took place here. The red sofa was itself a street sofa and was looking for a new home in the first corona lockdown. Utterly ugly and unsuitable for the apartment the brown sofa is located in, he cannot part with it for years and now tries to pay tribute to the sofa as a passed away family member in creating a portrait before it goes on its last journey through the exhibitions straight to the BSR wasteyard.
