BACKBONE

2021

with: Alicia Medina & DIALOG

“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” – Henry David Thoreau

‘BACKBONE’ proposed the installation of 400 interconnected wooden chairs in a spinal curve formation.

A survey by the Vancouver Foundation in 2012 found that one in four people in Vancouver say they are alone more often than they would like.

Recognizing that social connection is integral to a healthy society, BACKBONE positions the chair as the fundamental increment of social engagement. A generic wooden chair is used as the base unit for an interconnected platform to provoke new and spontaneous relationships essential to the story of social reconnection.

BACKBONE fuses 400 generic wooden chairs stacked along a curvilinear spine formation. While the organization of the group of chairs is complex, the individual chairs themselves are simple, altered only in height and placement.