Remix your chair

Project description

Remix ta Chaise undertakes the recovery and reimagining of broken or end-of-life chairs.

As part of our participation in FAB16 and Fab City Summit Montreal, we're developing an initiative for which we're inviting Fab Labs from around the world to join us in experimenting and sharing our experience at the events.

The main concept of the workshop project is to salvage unused or unloved chairs and then recreate functional chairs with a re-imagined aesthetic. The aim is to highlight creativity and reuse.

We are a digital fabrication workshop. So we take an idea, conceptualize it using computers and electronic instruments, and materialize it using the machines and tools at our disposal.

The achievements demonstrate that art plays an important role in the reuse of chairs by imagining and producing a reality quite different from the one currently deemed hegemonic. Art in the post-digital age has the potential not only to enable the conception and proclamation of ideas in theory, but also to materialize them. The underlying social imaginaries attribute a new role to art in society, and envisage an idea of culture beyond the individual and his or her possessions.

The creativity lies in the use of parts that are completely different from the original missing parts, giving free rein to the imagination of guest visual artists, designers and makers.

We encourage the use of a wide range of techniques for working and processing materials. From the most traditional to the most technological techniques (direct cutting, molding, laser cutting, 3D printing, for example).

Remixed chairs

6 legs are better than 4 - Rino Côté

Winter wood - Rino Côté

Marie-louise – Rino Côté

The fat lady next door - Rino Côté

When I grow up, I'm going to be a princess! - Rino Côté

Variation Princesse - Rino Côté

Mamzelle Margot – Louise Carier

Make your bets - Michel Ferlatte

Wooden leg - Michel Ferlatte

Sit on the grass - Andre Pettigrew / Poetti

Rocked by our memories - Émile Riopel

Once upon a time... the cow - Nora Golic

Dancing snakes - Anaïs Briend

In search of absolute balance - Philippe White

La douillette – Christelle Lebourgeois

Leather and wood - Frederick Belanger Lacourse

Merci la vie! – Christiane Théberge

Le boisé – Anaam Taghouti

Love seat – Miville

La coupole – Éric Gagné

Fertilité – Marlybell Ochoa Miranda

Totem – Omar Gammaoui

Velvet skin and vague eyes - Josianne Cyr

The 10-legged chair - André DesRochers

Illegal pool lifeguard chair - Daniel Luckhurst-Cartier

Le petit chat – Rino Côté

En veillant su’l l’ perron ! – Rino Côté

The launch

After an initial phase of conceptual research, a brainstorming workshop and consultation with local residents involved with echofab, the project was launched.

Creation of a poster announcing the search for chairs.

Postings on community bulletin boards in the Borough of Ahuntsic-Cartierville and pick-up during the July 1 moving party.

Picking up chairs in the neighborhood with the Fab Labs Nation van.

Call for projects

Calls for proposals are launched by the Remix ta Chaise team. The project calls on Montreal visual artists, designers and makers.

We invite visual artists, designers and makers to give a second life to unloved chairs. Put your creativity and inventiveness to work for a good cause! The revived chairs will be auctioned off at Campus Fab City on August 13 and 14, 2021, on the Esplanade Louvain in Montreal's Central District, with proceeds going to create a neighborhood park bench.

The concept is to salvage old, broken or unloved chairs and remake them into functional chairs with a new aesthetic. The idea is not to reproduce exactly the missing or broken part.
This rehabilitation of broken chairs could be done with other totally disparate pieces. Like a missing chair leg replaced by a piece of lamp ... that could light up!

All techniques can be used, from the most traditional to the most technological (direct cutting, molding, laser cutting, 3D printing...). For 3D-printed parts, it would be good to be able to apply the recyclability logo with the number of the product used, e.g. PLA, PETG.

Your work will be showcased through a social media communication approach based on photos/videos of the creative stages to keep this crazy adventure in memory. During the Campus period, this footage will be broadcast as a report, and the chair will be exhibited.

This call is launched to encourage citizen collaboration, reparability and the circularity of goods, issues at the heart of the Fab City Summit's initiative and theme: “Manufacturing the Commons”.

Digital fabrication is about to grow exponentially in our society, and we predict that in the future, neighborhoods, villages and schools will be equipped with Fab Labs that respond to their needs and realities. Digital fabrication is not just a means of building an object, but a tool for uniting the beings of a community, creatively, economically and socially. Our raison d'être is to invite citizens to participate as much in the process of setting up the workshop as in its use. We believe in the crucial importance of sharing the material means of production, as well as the resulting knowledge.

We're located in the heart of Montreal's Central District. We collaborate with Fab Labs around the world. We connect with communities of hackers, makers, technicians, academics and citizens. As the district is a fundamental element of our city's civic life, bringing us together in a geographical location, we aim to position ourselves as a dynamic and evolving creative center within this ensemble.