Fabien Cappello: Sillas Callejeras/Street Chairs 2019

Fabien Cappello’s SILLAS CALLEJERAS (STREET CHAIRS, 2018) offers lessons in design and ingenuity from Mexico City. The photographic series depicts a collection of chairs assembled from everyday contexts across the sprawling metropolis — market stalls, shops, street stands, and elsewhere. Cappello casts an anthropological eye on artifacts that reflect a city where artisanal manufacture and resourceful reuse still hold. In his installation at Berkeley, these images appear in unexpected corners of Jacobs Hall, taking on mundane forms that evoke the vernacular contexts from which the chairs are drawn. Cappello’s images offer a training in designerly attitude— cultivating an attention to everyday acts of making and making do that reveal design as a grounded practice of living in place.