A Chair in the Room 

The Semiotics of Sitting

In Latin America, the chair occupies a central and often overlooked place in everyday life. It is present in rural homes and public plazas, inside crowded city schools and at the edges of municipal offices. Across these spaces, the chair asserts itself discreetly, a shared object that blends into regularities of work, conversation, waiting, gathering, celebration, and everyday routine. The plastic monobloc chair, in particular, has become emblematic of informal economies and collective gatherings. It appears at family celebrations, political rallies, neighborhood meetings, and roadside food stands.

My fascination with chairs began consciously with the Open Silla event at Boston University in 2022. Students, faculty and artists from different backgrounds participated in an afternoon of multilingual artistic performances. Chairs were placed at the center of a public space, the focal points around which performances in English, Spanish, French, Haitian Creole, Polish and other languages unfolded. Participants brought poems, songs and performances that reflected their linguistic and cultural preferences. The setting emphasized openness and accessibility, which allowed both prepared and improvised performances to happen naturally. Performers and audience members shared the same ground, with no barriers or raised stages separating those who spoke from those who listened.

The chair was not elevated on a platform or confined to a formal performance area. Instead, it remained at ground level, accessible to anyone willing to engage with it. People could sit, stand beside it, use it as a prop, or simply move around it during their performances. This arrangement reinforced the idea that the chair belonged equally to everyone present. It invited different kinds of interaction and allowed the chair to shift meaning depending on who used it and how they chose to approach it.

The term “Open Silla” captured the essence of the event’s approach. Participants were invited to sit, reflect, and perform without rigid expectations, using the chair as a shared object that linked different performances together. The chair served as a shared point that welcomed different interpretations, creative acts, and ways of connecting. Using the chair in the performance reflected Gaston Bachelard’s idea that small spaces can become places of personal and creative change. In the context of the Open Silla, the chair was no longer a passive prop It became a drum for musicians, a seat for solo performers, a place for students to share their published work, and a platform for poetry recited in different languages. Everyone who used the chair gave it a new purpose, showing how a simple seat could become part of their music, poetry, or story. The chair gathered traces of each performance, accumulating memory and presence through the event.

This layering of use reinforced the idea that everyday objects, often overlooked in their ordinariness, can be remade into shared platforms for artistic expression. The Open Silla demonstrated how an object as common as a chair could shift between functional and symbolic roles in rapid succession. Its ability to host different languages, bodies, movements and artistic forms emphasized the flexibility of meaning carried within the object itself. Beyond its artistic focus, the Open Silla also showed how objects like the chair can help build a sense of community. The multilingual and multicultural character of the performances stressed that the chair does not belong to a single tradition or aesthetic. It acts as a space to be shared where people from different cultures and backgrounds can come together on equal terms.

 My fascination with chairs was reinforced by the cover of Bad Bunny’s 2025 album DeBí Tirar Más Fotos, in which a pair of plastic chairs signals an emotional geography shared across Latin America and its diasporas. Together, these cases show how an ordinary object moves through the domains of art, labor, public ritual and collective memory.

The role of a chair is created by the conditions around it with different meanings depending on whether it serves as a seat at a family gathering or as a temporary resting place in a busy downtown. Rather than belonging to a single social function or holding a fixed aesthetic value, the chair adapts to the spaces it inhabits. It enters domestic routines, political movements, artistic performances, public rituals and becomes part of a larger network of meaning.

The Bad Bunny album featured two white plastic chairs set on a field of grass as its cover art. The image immediately resonated with audiences across Latin America and its diasporas and sparked widespread emotional reactions. Fans associated the chairs with scenes of everyday life: family gatherings on patios, quiet afternoons in backyards, neighborhood celebrations where plastic chairs are lined up for visitors, and long conversations shared during warm evenings. Though Bad Bunny offered no direct commentary on the image, the lack of explanation seemed to invite even greater attachment. Viewers projected their own experiences onto the chairs, linking them to comfort, belonging, absence, and the rituals of social life. The strong emotional reaction to this simple image shows how ordinary objects can take on several meanings across different communities through shared visual culture. This phenomenon aligns with Roland Barthes’ theory of modern myth, where objects from everyday life take on larger cultural narratives without needing explicit framing. Plastic chairs, by their very design and widespread availability, become objects that are shared across cultures. They are not rare or precious; they are durable and common in spaces where life unfolds publicly and privately. Through the album cover, Bad Bunny’s chairs are universally legible signs and evoke a wide emotional geography rooted in familiarity.

The choice to feature two empty chairs, rather than a crowded scene or a human figure, also opens the image to multiple interpretations. The chairs could represent a memory of a gathering that has ended, an invitation for future company, a recognition of people, or a quiet reminder of someone who is missing. By using such an understated object, the album cover captures a sense of everyday nostalgia without relying on grand or obvious symbols. It shows how material culture can hold powerful emotional charge precisely because of its ordinariness, which suggests a way for communities to see themselves reflected in the simplest of forms.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chair_law

Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, reminds us that everyday objects hold meaning. They are places where experience gathers and memories stay, holding more meaning than their physical form suggests. The chair marks the patterns of a household, bearing silent witness to conversations held at kitchen tables, to the stillness of solitary afternoons, to the quiet routines that frame the beginning and end of each day. A chair records moments of presence and absence, preserving the traces of those who have come and gone. It holds the memory of a grandparent who claimed a favorite seat during family meals, a visitor who stayed too long and turned a casual visit into an evening of telling stories, a young child who is curled up between two chairs late at night at a family party. Over time, the chair may gather layers of meaning connected to the people who used it, from the worn imprint left by habitual use to the emptiness that follows a migration, a death, or a change in family structure. It holds small pieces of home life in its shape over time.

Jean Baudrillard, in The System of Objects, depicts how meaning accumulates in material forms that move beyond their original function. He argues that objects gain significance through their insertion into systems of cultural signification, where the purposes they were designed to fulfill often fade behind what they come to represent. “The object no longer serves; it signifies.” The chair’s meaning, therefore, is not confined to its ability to support the body. It becomes part of a larger system of meaning that connects memory, migration, shared identity and creative expression. It enters rituals of home life, but it also moves across borders and into spaces of public performance. It appears in acts of protest where chairs are arranged in empty rows to mark absence and in art installations where chairs conjure stories of displacement and resilience. Through these different uses, the chair shows how everyday objects can hold meanings that shape how people and communities live in the world. The chair, beyond its domestic and artistic meanings, has also been the subject of political debate and legal reform. In Chile, the “Chair Law” of 1914 (Law No. 2,951) mandated that employers must provide seats for workers during their shifts, ensuring that employees would have the ability to rest without jeopardizing their position or facing employer retaliation. This regulation marked one of the earliest instances in Latin America in which an everyday object entered into the sphere of labor rights and state intervention. It reflected the growing recognition that working conditions needed to address not only wages and hours, but the physical needs of the human body during long hours of labor.

The Chair Law was a direct response to the demands of early labor movements, which sought to protect workers’ dignity through material improvements in their working environments. Having a chair available in shops, factories and commercial spaces became a sign that labor was not a purely mechanical force but something embodied and vulnerable. The law implicitly recognized that standing for long hours could degrade health, endurance and human worth, especially in service and retail jobs. By legislating rest through the provision of a seat, the Chilean government responded to pressure from growing union activity and from social reformers who emphasized that humane labor conditions began with basic gestures of bodily care.

Similar legal measures were enacted in other national contexts. In Spain, a 1912 law required seating for shop employees, and in Argentina, regulations passed in 1931 specifically mandated seats for female workers in commercial settings. These policies framed the ability to sit as a right, not a privilege, embedding bodily needs into the language of law. They also introduced a new way of thinking about public and workplace environments, where the arrangement of space became part of broader conversations about power, access and the recognition of the worker as a subject worthy of protection.

Source: https://www.bu.edu/las/2022/04/15/event-highlights-open-silla/

The provision of a chair in the workplace became more than a logistical concern; it took on symbolic weight as a mark of whether institutions valued or disregarded the people who labored within them. Sitting, often taken for granted in privileged spaces, emerged as an act that signaled whether someone had been granted the right to rest, to occupy space without constant exertion, or to be acknowledged as fully human within economic structures. In this way, the chair crossed from being a utilitarian object into a contested marker of dignity, health and bodily autonomy. Its presence, within working spaces reflecteed broader social tensions over labor, respect, and the distribution of comfort.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debí_Tirar_Más_Fotos

In stories and experiences shaped by migration, the chair often becomes a symbol of absence in families. In many Latin American homes, especially where people have been forced to leave or families have been separated, it’s common to leave an empty chair at the table during holidays or special gatherings. The chair is left on purpose, as a quiet way to remember someone who is not present. It might be for a person who moved far away or who passed away. Even without words, the empty chair helps people feel that the person is still part of the moment. In Latin America, chairs have been used in public memorials to represent absence and to honor those lost to political violence. In Chile, the Memorial Tres Sillas (Three Chairs Memorial) in Santiago commemorates Santiago Nattino, José Manuel Parada and Manuel Guerrero, who were abducted and killed by the dictatorship in 1985. The monument features three large metal chairs, each resembling a school chair, placed as a physical representation of the individuals who are no longer present. Their size and emptiness convey the impact of their loss and their continued presence in collective memory. In Colombia, artist Doris Salcedo used chairs in her installation Noviembre 6 y 7, which commemorated the victims of the 1985 siege of the Palace of Justice. She suspended empty chairs on the building’s façade, turning everyday objects into symbols of absence and grief. These memorials use the image of the chair to mark loss in visible ways, which allows communities to engage with memory through familiar forms.

Source: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_Tres_Sillas

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/arts/design/doris-salcedo-whose-art-honors-lives-lost-gets-a-retrospective-in-chicago.html

Performance artists across Latin America have incorporated the chair into their explorations of migration and displacement. Installations and public memorials often use chairs as stand-ins for bodies, histories and silenced voices. Dominican artist Iliana Emilia García has created installations where chairs symbolize movement, migration. In her projects, Iliana Emilia García has developed a rich body of work centered on the chair as a symbol of identity. In her installation The Pursuit of Happiness (2014), García suspends deconstructed wooden chairs from the wall using ropes and metal hooks, creating a sense of instability and interdependence.

In Formations-Structures of Survival (2018), García presents large-scale canvases filled with repeated chair forms drawn in acrylic, ink and charcoal. The chairs appear in grids, stacks and scattered patterns, creating a visual rhythm that shifts between structure and disorder. This repetition reflects how everyday objects, like the chair, can become part of a larger system of meaning tied to routine. The chair here acts as a familiar form that holds onto the idea of home and identity, even when its arrangement becomes unstable. As Roland Barthes describes, such objects function as “open signifiers,” flexible symbols that carry different meanings depending on their context. García’s chairs suggest that tradition can persist, even as it is disrupted or transformed by migration or change.

In another work, The Sage and the Dreamer (2018), García builds a sculpture from forty handmade wooden chairs arranged into a tall, tree-like structure. The installation refers to the intertwined histories of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, two countries that share land but have distinct social and political narratives. The chairs are not used for sitting but stacked in a way that suggests mutual support and shared weight. The structure recalls Gaston Bachelard’s ideas about the poetic function of everyday spaces. The chair becomes more than a domestic object; it becomes a container of history that is molded by craft and passed between generations. Through form and repetition, García’s work shows how a simple object like a chair can carry personal meaning across space and time.

Source: https://www.ilianaemilia.com

Source: https://www.ilianaemilia.com

Source: https://www.ilianaemilia.com

Source: https://www.ilianaemilia.com