Anyone who has ever watched a professional wrestling knows one thing well: at some point during the event, a folding chair will enter the ring.
What happens to this object intended for sitting on when it enters a fight? For the exhibition RESET at Salone del Mobile in Milan, Natasha Taylor examined the relationship between the designer’s intention for the chair and its actual use within wrestling.
A foreign object is a term within professional wrestling for an object that is introduced into the wrestling match. How has something that normally supports the body made a transition into something else; a weapon? And just like in professional wrestling what transit does an object make when they are brought into an art arena?
The folding chair is hidden away in the design spectrum. Why is that? Folding chairs are on the receiving end of a lot more violence from the human opponent. They get placed here and there, dropped and stacked according to the occasion and are therefore under continuous structural strain.
In Dutch, a folding chair is called a ‘klapstoel’, which loosely translates into hit(ting) chair. Why has this easy-to-use object become a symbol within this athletic form of entertainment? What impact does it have when a chair designed to fold becomes a ‘hitting chair’?
