The Act of Sitting
Edition of 500

264 pages
Softcover with sleeve
17 x 22.6 cm

Year            2021
Design        Maximilian Mauracher, David Rindlisbacher
Publisher    POOL publishing
ISBN           978-3-9504596-9-2

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Bookstores

ofr, Paris

Dashwood Books, NYC 

Import News, NYC

Foam Museum, Amsterdam 

QWSTION Store, Vienna



THE ACT OF SITTING
A Visual Exploration of ‘Sitting’ as an Action and Idea

‘The Act Of Sitting’ is a series of portraits of individuals in their homes in New York, Vienna, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Dakar, and other locations worldwide. The imagery was shot through a digital video conference system during the COVID-19 lockdowns between March and June 2020.

Because of the pandemic and the drastic limitations it has placed on our personal freedoms, we have been asked to stay home, to ‘sit through’ this. What happens within us when we are pulled away from our routines—our physical and social surroundings—and ‘sitting’ at home in isolation suddenly becomes the main reality of our lives?

Within this global, historical context, the project’s concept revolves around observing the physical act of ‘sitting’ through a series of digital portraits, videos and text. We asked each person to express their individual interpretation of ‘sitting’ for their shoot, and write a passage of text to accompany it. The intention was to see how a word associated with a position of rest and inactivity can instead become a social, political, and performative act of connection and self expression. Sitting not as a passive attitude, but as an activity that is relevant to the individual as well as the collective.


© anna—maria ritsch