Theory Of The Bench (Manuel Bürger)

"The average duration of a Bench Session is 4-8 hours, considered as good range of quality time for proper contemplation and distraction. The start and end have no necessary relation to the solar day, but it should be noted that the very last hours of the night are generally unsuitable for Benching. But this duration is merely a statistical average. For one thing, a Bench Session rarely occurs in its pure form: it is difficult for the participants to avoid setting aside some minutes for taking care of banal tasks like phone calls. But more importantly, a Bench Session often takes place within a deliberately limited period of a few hours, or even fortuitously during fairly brief moments; conversely it may last for a day without interruption."

Together with the Australian artist Thomas Jeppe, Manuel Bürger, the designer of diverse material and immaterial identities, wrote the book Theory of the Bench (Naives&Visionaires, 2014). In it, the Situationist practice of dérive is examined through the act of sitting. Instead of running through the streets spontaneously with a map like Guy Debord and cease driving things physically and emotionally and allowing oneself to be carried along, the city rotates around the subject in benching. To do so, one just needs the right place: the bench. Sitting around and observing is by no means relaxation or indolence, but instead playful and deconstructionist. Manuel Bürger explains why using images and text – a keynote lecture with which we will close the PAF, in order to open things up again next year somewhere else.