speaking chairs

20220908-20220918
Sint-Jacobskerk, Ghent.

100 Church chairs by 100 artists.
Project by Onbetaalbaar in collaboration with Campo, 019-ghent, Designmuseum Ghent.
Pictures by Richard Duyck.

Speaking Chairs is an investigation into the reallocation of the iconic church or prayer chair that has fallen into disuse. They systematically disappeared from churches, exchanged for more comfortable seats, or discarded in the wake of secularization. They are stacked meters high in dark cellars, waiting for a second life. As silent witnesses of a rich past.

PRAY WHAT YOU CAN!
By adding an R it becomes deliberately this tongue-in-cheek title.
A wooden church chair with the weight of an average person by using 5 bags of wood pellets. The bags are pierced with cheap incense sticks. A heavy chain is attached to the back so that the lighter cannot be stolen.

...About an assumed distrust and the current relationship with money, our alienation of Western tradition and the Catholic faith, Eastern spirituality as a decorative replacement, financial poverty and poverty in faith, the race to the bottom or the materialistic ideal of always a lot and always cheap, the changing value of energy and our cultural anxiety about these changes.

Olivier Goedhals A
Olivier Goedhals B
Olivier Goedhals C
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