Furniture
Through Amie Siegel's 2013 video piece ‘Provenance’, we visually begin to understand the complexity and the abstract nature movement has in relating to origin and homeland. What struck me is the absorption of these objects into their new surroundings, where the designer’s names become privileged rather than the social and political significance of both Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s 1948 design intervention of Chandigarh. Once placed in pristine apartments of the top one-percent economically, the inert residual history the objects carry slowing fades into meaninglessness when used to outwardly express authority through wealth.
It is the chairs ‘objecthoodness’ that becomes privileged, and much like maps, the chairs are directional arrows pointing to a larger narrative we can either interact with or choose to ignore. Or as Harley states in his book The New Nature of Maps, “Maps were used to legitimize the reality of conquest and empire. They helped create myths which would assist in the maintenance of the territorial status quo” (Harley 57). Here the myth is the greatness of Chandigarh on display and as these objects generate a new system of mapping within the commodities market, the culture they describe will continue to merge together these relational and physical spaces destabilizing the form of traditional mapping and making us continue to question ‘where am I from?