Empty Chair (Studies on Squats), 2020
Live performance, 14 minutes
Empty Chair was a live performance with recorded spoken words that initiated the Studies on Squats project. It tells the story of an empty chair and the ghostly figure to whom this technological invention of the chair is novelty.
The umbrella project Studies on Squats examines the bodily posture of the squat as a performative archive of cultural, affective, and political data. Using the “Asian squat” as a central mode, the project approaches posture as an embodied information system through which histories of migration, illness, resilience, and collective survival circulate. The project investigates how certain gestures become legible, misread, or rendered invisible within public infrastructures and broader data cultures. Field research, relational movement practices, and choreographic mapping are woven together to reveal the squat as a tactic of care, endurance, humor, and resistance — a posture that unsettles normative expectations around how bodies should appear in public space.
Support: Treptower Ateliers
Curated by: Rina Nakano
Photo Documentation: Michele Caliari