“The book is called /ʃɛz/, which is phonetic for “chair” in French, “chaise.” I created it in 2017 through my travel in Czech Republic where I studied for a semester under Sasha and Hynek Alt.

This book is a satire about chairs. I wanted to question the picture-perfect booklets of objects where everyone is pretty and perfectly pictured. I wanted to question why do we all sit on chairs? Why is it something so important and natural in today’s society?

My work is based from self-portrait and self-exploration, I research what it means to be a young adult in this society and what it means living in this technology age where everyone wants to be the most beautiful and successful meanwhile sitting on a chair and contemplating life.

This book is an exploration of the design of a chair and is an ode to its raw aesthetic and its everyday use. Because we use chairs all the time without really caring about it, we don’t look at our chairs anymore. Maybe we look at them for the first two weeks of our purchases but afterward, they go unappreciated. I wanted to shed a light on those everyday objects that we don’t see anymore and give them a fun twist of fate, a new life, a funny dark humoristic way of being. To transform a chair into something beautiful, something that is made for more than just sitting, far from those picture-perfect imaginaries.

What would be the world without chairs? What would we do if the objects we use every day didn’t exist or stopped existing?

It starts as the perfect booklet for chairs. Indeed, the cover is a studio picture as a chair but at the same time, it is pictured in an unusual way. The chair is fallen down suggesting a power dynamic where the chair is subject to your needs. Moreover, the chair is put in a more artistic view, here, with the light and the position reassemble more of an abstract sculpture than a standard chair.

Inside of the book is a collection of self-portrait where I try sitting in the most abnormal ways possible, experimenting with different kind of chairs.”

-Aurélie Bayad