/ sillata.
chair and sculpture (2024)
personal
Sillata is a collection of pieces that uses chairs and piñatas as icons to recontextualize them in pieces that use iconoclasm as a medium.
Chair replicas have been a normalized and continuous blind practice within the design scene, where companies copy existing iconic designs proved to bring them economic success, without crediting the original icon. On the other hand, the piñateros (piñata makers) analyze in an informal methodology, current iconic topics to recontextualize them into piñatas where they try to replicate their original icon. Understanding the iconicness of piñatas as a cultural element in Mexican culture and the clichés that industrial designers tend to associate with chairs through an analysis of the intersection of these two contrasting views led to the birth of Sillata.
Sillata aims to de-iconize the non-contemporary ideas of the Cis-Hetero-White-Privileged-European industrial design icons by making a critique towards the replica practice, and comparing it with the craft of piñata making, embodying the ephemeral nature of these objects. Through an iconoclastic approach and material experimentation, the pieces aim to communicate the act of playful destruction of icons for the birth of new ones. Sillata facilitates transformation through deception, creating two pieces: a chair and a piñata, using the same elements rearranged.
At last, the pieces navigate my positioning as a designer-maker-performer, understanding the current state of my practice. Using performance and product design as mediums to communicate this idea in a materiality that combines elements from both worlds, with a colorful approach that conveys the comical element of piñatas combined with the sobriety of chairs.
/ design: Mijali Posada Polydorides.
/ materials and techniques: Pine Solid Wood, Crepé Paper, Colored Bond Paper, Low Temperature Ceramics
/ dimensions:
_ chair (42 x 46 x 85 H cm).
_ piñata (113 x 28 x 85 H cm).
/ status: production.
/ production place: Eindhoven, Netherlands.
/ photography: Mijali Posada Polydorides.