Guatemalans are, statistically speaking, the tiniest people on the planet, so it should come as no surprise that their chaotic capital city has been built around an effigy of a high chair. Priscilla la Silla, as she is known to the eclectic mix of street urchins and aristocracy who gather at her feet, serves as an opus to the hopes and aspirations of the deeply spiritual hoi polloi, who are forever looking to the skies, daydreaming of a better life.
Bereft of grandiloquence and with a haughty, bordeline-alturistic aura, Priscilla combines the ribald optimism of Mayan folklore with the mischievous spectre of Spanish colonialism. The giant chair‘s four legs, each of equal length, represent Guatemala’s quartered and eternally fractured narrative; the ancient, the awakening, the present and the unfolding.
Surreptitiously obscured betwixt a jaunty thatch of evergreen ferns, this remarkable piece marks the zenith of Guatemala City’s famed Zona 14, where sun-kissed coffee shops filled with the magniloquent noblesse hang like incandescent baubles before antediluvian volcanoes.
The name, chosen amongst much conjecture, is an ode to the widely-beloved yet ever-controversial Priscilla Bianchi, whose range of wholesome hand-spun quilts and associated haberdashery have become dernier cri for Central American glitterati, and lionised the Guatemalan diaspora.
The seat’s sublime design, though impractical, is not condescendingly so, and thus boasts a sanguine vivacity that will satiate the peccadilloes – no matter how audacious – of even the most fervent scholar of the Bigs. Reminiscent of the early works of Alexander Calder, Priscilla eschews astringency in favour of benevolence. A soliloquy to a simpler time, perhaps?
My colleague Gordon, ever the malcontent, offered his own conclusion. “Maybe,” he pontificated, caressing Priscilla la Silla’s oblique intersections with a single flocculent hand, “it’s just a really big chair.”
