Sit With It
A self-initiated editorial study of taste and desire, staged through bodies contorting to become the design objects they cannot, or will not, own.
→ Culture
Form following feeling rather than function.
A collectible chair can cost more than a car, and design has become the cleanest shorthand for taste. But underneath the status question is a quieter one that gets asked less often. Can you love a beautiful object plainly, want to own it, and not be shallow for it? In an era of algorithmic taste and endless designer-adjacent slop, admiring a thing for its form alone has started to feel almost suspicious, as if real appreciation and mere acquisition have become impossible to tell apart.
The mime is the figure who resolves it. Priced out, or opting out, they don't consume the object. They study it so closely they become it. The contortion is devotion, not defeat. It asks whether going without is deprivation or the purest form of appreciation there is, admiration with nothing to acquire at the end of it.
There is a labour point sitting inside the same frame. The performers who hold these poses are paid a fraction of what the objects beside them are worth. The body that performs luxury is priced nothing like the luxury it performs, and putting both in one frame is the only way to see that clearly.
→ Creativity
We built the work as a set of diptychs, in stills and in film. One side holds a single iconic design piece as still life, lit against flat colour so the form reads clean and sculptural. The other side answers it with a body. A contortionist or mime, styled to match, folded into a human version of the object.
The casting carries the argument. A trained body can approximate a chair but never comfortably, and the strain is left visible on purpose, so you can see the cost of holding the shape. That is where the title comes from. Sit With It is what you tell the performer and what the image asks of the viewer, the furniture and the discomfort inside the same three words. We collaborated with mimes and movement choreographers. The concept underneath is slippery, that wanting a beautiful thing and admiring it are hard to pull apart.
