Chair as the focal point of community’s life

Travelling around some Middle Eastern and Arabic countries, I have been fascinating by the massive use of the chair as a fulcrum around which many social activities there take place. Socialization of any kind happens to involve a chair, and often a chair is actually the only way for creating the atmosphere which allows the socialization, in general accompanied with a glass of tea. Chairs are not only present in a café, where their number is out of proportion to the number of tables, but they are used massively for creating a street “shop” where needed for selling in an intersection vegetables, fruits or whatever other stuff, for creating a location where chattering around and observing people passing by…often even apparently abandoned somewhere, but truly just waiting for somebody to sit and rest or chatter or observe, or sell, or have a tea, or read the newspaper... This pictures taken in Cairo, Egypt, are part of a wider series and of an on-going long term project trying to collect different use of the chair in many middle eastern countries, till now including: Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia, Jordan, Morocco.