Abundance Fantasies: Friedeberg’s Hand Chair

In Abundance Fantasies we explore how a desire for abundance is sometimes found in unsuspected places, practices and objects. Perhaps such encounters can be reinforced to stimulate a desire to shrink.

In “The Art of small things” John Mack writes: “In literature, as much as in lived experience, the hand is, in fact, often at once the measure and the container of the miniature. Things that ‘would fit into the palm of your hands’ are, by definition small.” The iconic Hand-chair (1962) by the Mexican artist/designer Pedro Friedeberg both defies and defines this observation allowing us a confused ‘Alice in Wonderland’- experience of simultaneous largeness and smallness concentrated into one. One feels small while at the same experiencing some form of dominance through the act of sitting on top of an abundance of power.