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Trigger

A chair is said to be an item without which a designer’s career is incomplete. That said, this chair journey did not start with legacy making, in mind.

I found myself at odds with my ability to define myself, mainly because there are the ways I see the world, and then there are the ways in which I operate within it. For most, the latter is enough to have a word or two succinctly capture their comings and goings, however for me it felt like my more theoretical execution often eclipsed my history of making within studio art. Having felt this tug of war within myself, I wanted to make something, anything, and of course the chair; the small, yet just big enough object that announces itself, but not too loudly; became the object of choice.

As I considered the chair, I did what I often do which is looking for definitions right from the onset. The vast definitions made me realise that the actual seating comes secondary in this entire exploration, and that is where my feet first took me.

Follow on this journey with us.
 x Pumla Maswanganyi

Overview / TL;DR

Drawing on Tsonga seating customs, particularly the sangu or xitheve (mat), the project explores seating as fluid, adaptable and shaped by the needs of the person after whom its built. The chair is understood as an extension of the person, informed by their movement, setting and way of life. This line of thinking moves away from the singular, Eurocentric notion of a ‘chair’ and draws instead from mat-based practices that are communal, practical and creatively resourceful.

Etymology

The word chair originates from Old French and Latin roots:

Latin: cathedra (meaning “seat, bench, chair”), from kata- (“down”) + hedra (“seat, base”). This root also gives us words like cathedral (literally “the seat of a bishop”).
Old French: chaiere or chaire (12th century) Meaning “seat, throne, chair,” used to describe authority or leadership.
Middle English (13th-14th century): chaire Adopted from Old French, initially referring to a throne or seat of authority.
Over time, it became the general term for a seat with a backrest.

Seating histories

For design theorists, it is important to separate seating as a human condition from the chair as an object. Humans have been sitting for hundreds of thousands of years, and long before chairs, seating was temporary and responsive to the environment: earth, rocks, logs, and mats formed adaptive, modular surfaces that could be reconfigured or abandoned with mobility.

These practices dominated across much of the world and remain embedded in floor-based traditions, where the body organises space directly. They were modular and impermanent, adjusted to circumstance rather than fixed in form.

Chairs appear comparatively late, and from their beginning they were not about sitting in general but about people who held defined roles. To be given a chair was to be set apart, and the structure of the seat adapted to the authority of the person in it.

The chair is therefore a recent cultural invention layered onto the far older practice of human seating, with its meaning bound less to comfort than to the power and identity of the sitter.

What does a nomadic ‘chair’ look like?

A question asked by John Eaves Cooper.

Its deeply personal, but doesn’t lose its communal value.

Functionally:
Portable, collapsible, lightweight
Possibly modular or multipurpose (sits, carries, transforms)
Weather-proof, terrain-adaptable

Emotionally:
Represents impermanence and adaptability
Home carried within: a place to pause
May be imbued with memory, worn with time, becoming a personal relic
Comfort redefined: not plush, but constant / ever-reliable
Emblem of freedom and solitude, as much as belonging

Hierarchically:
Non-authoritative, anti-throne: perhaps democratic or egalitarian
But could also suggest inner sovereignty: the idea of carrying your own throne
Evokes the leader who walks among people, not above them
Could be ceremonial (ritual, used during rites of passage, transitions etc)

Duality

““Peter Smithson, one of the few architects of the 1960s with a sophisticated understanding of design, believed that the continuing charm of the chair for people who are not designers came down to its cute, anthropomorphic looks. 'People rarely collect cupboards or dressing tables, or stools, but to collect chairs is common. It is probable that we see them as domestic pets; they have legs, feet, arms, and backs. They are symmetrical in one direction, like animals, or like ourselves.’”
- B is for Bauhaus: An A-Z of the Modern World, Deyan Sudjic.

Two Key interests emerge:
The multiplicity of the idea of the chair (the person and the action / the person defining the action)

Chair as active personification more than passive object:  An embodiment of the sitter, hence its anthropomorphic qualities
Chair as a Verb:  The act of facilitating and leading

Going from Etyomology to Reflection

Considering that a chair was originally a person and then evolved to be a role (before being flattened to a seat): The seat is built around that person and the role they assume when in that chair. Therefore, the chair itself doesn’t have a function per se, but it is the person who gives the object everything about it beyond just ‘meaning’. The person gives it the structure, material, dimensions etc

In essence: the chair is not an object. It is reflection of identity materialised in structure.

If the chair is first a person and only then a role, it goes beyond being an object of fixed utility and more an embodiment shaped around living presence.

The object does not exist in isolation.
It is made in response to the body, the collective, and the context that calls it into being. A true chair accommodates the complexity of the person who sits: their body, their habits, their relations, and their community. To think of the chair as me, or as us, shifts the design question from what the chair looks like to who it embodies and enables, how it supports, how it arranges space, and how it confirms one’s role.

If ‘chair’ is the embodiment of a Tsonga being, what does that look like?

For us Tsonga people, seating is defined by sangu or xitheve, a grass mat that supports multiple aspects of daily life.
It is used for sitting, sleeping, eating, and during larger life events such as birthing; making it central to one’s living space and living practice.

The mat is not treated as precious, and it is assumed that it will be well worn, and that the owner will have many of them over time.

While reeds form the base, its construction often incorporates found materials such as sweet wrappers, fruit sacks, crisp packets, and shopping bags, which serve both practical and decorative purposes. Patterns vary widely, from straight rows to chicken-wire motifs, but the choice of motif ultimately lies with the maker. The approach to design emphasises flexibility and ownership, where the mat reflects the individual through its form, material, and use.

Therefore, if chair is me within the frame of my Tsonga identity: what does that mean?

Modularity: I love getting multiple uses out of anything. call it conscious consumption, call it economic, but I quite like knowing that something can carry me in all the ways I would need to be carried, especially as someone who has the sense of nomadicy in living. 

There’s something about living both indoors / outdoors and elsewhere–home being in your body, and your belongings being the extension of that.