Year
2021
Tag
Installations
A chair can refuse a person without displaying a rule. Its seat is still recognisable, its back and legs still promise a place to rest, but a barrier occupies the space where the body should go. The instruction has been built into the object.
For Hostile Architecture, we made five altered wooden chairs and placed them beside a projected journey through Barcelona. The chairs concentrated an experience that the film located in the streets: the deliberate interruption of sitting, lying down or finding a temporary place of shelter.
Sculptural installation and video · 730 Hours of Violence · Mutuo Gallery, Barcelona.
Installation documentation · 2021 · Silent excerpt from the exhibition camera archive.
Reading a surface with the body
The modifications were visible at close range. An obstructed seat turned a familiar object into a negotiation with discomfort. Its meaning did not depend on a technical explanation; the visitor could read the difficulty through an ordinary knowledge of sitting.
In public space, such decisions can be less conspicuous. A slope, a division in a bench or a metal element may be read as decoration, maintenance or security. Its exclusionary function becomes clearer when considered from the position of someone who needs to rest there. The same surface can therefore appear unobjectionable to one person and make a place unusable for another.
A journey through Barcelona
The accompanying film used Google Maps and Street View to revisit examples in the city. A tool normally used to find a destination became a way to examine the details encountered along the route. The exhibition’s 2021 research cited more than 160 examples of hostile architecture and Arrels Fundació’s count of 1,064 people sleeping on Barcelona’s streets.
Those figures locate the work in its original moment. They also place the design decisions beside the people most exposed to them. Preventing a person from sleeping at one address does not provide that person with a home. It changes where their need can be seen.
The right to remain
Cara Chellew’s research on defensive urban design and Jessica Gerrard and collaborators’ writing on the public visibility of homelessness helped frame this relationship between exclusion and appearance. A city can seek to remove the sight of a social problem while leaving its conditions intact.
The chairs brought that distance into the gallery. They were objects of attention that withheld an ordinary use. Beside them, the film returned the same logic to places that could otherwise pass unnoticed. Public space was considered through the duration of a person’s presence: the difference between being allowed to move through a city and being able to remain somewhere within it.
Hostile Architecture · 4:30 · English text. Original film, 2021; new sound edition, 2026. Imagery: Google Maps / Street View.
Ordinary furniture, interrupted
Five custom wooden chairs translated different forms of exclusion into altered seats and obstructed resting surfaces. A projector showed the accompanying Street View film beside the physical objects, linking the interventions on the chairs to their urban counterparts.
Assembly study · An explanatory reconstruction from the exhibition archive. Components are separated for clarity; proportions are illustrative.
Materials & components
- Five custom wooden chairs
- Modified seat surfaces and barriers
- Projector and looping film
Selected references
- Cara Chellew, Defending Suburbia: Exploring the use of defensive urban design outside of the city centre (2019).
- Arrels Fundació, Elementos arquitectónicos que vulneran derechos (2018).
- Arrels Fundació, Barcelona street-homelessness count (2021).
- Jessica Gerrard and collaborators, The 'lamentable sight' of homelessness and the society of the spectacle (2015).
- Judith Butler, Frames of War, as cited in the exhibition research.
Part of 730 Hours of Violence, an exhibition by Domestic Data Streamers at Mutuo Gallery, Barcelona, 7–30 September 2021.
This project received funding through the MediaFutures project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 951962. The work reflects the authors’ views; the European Commission is not responsible for any use of the information.
