Reframing Conventions: ‘Time-Lapse Edition’
Live-performance intervention (commissioned)
Duration: 2+ hours
2025

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A site-specific performance intervention expanding on my performance work Reframing Conventions (2013/2020) and continuing the long-term research into sitting behavior. 

For the durational live performance work Reframing Conventions (2013) I sat on the same chair for eight hours without practicing any other action. This live performance derived from my research into the convention of sitting (in office spaces); questioning the act of sitting and how our bodies were conditioned to remain passive, seated, and still within Western office settings. 

In spaces like this one at De Balie, people are typically expected, or even socially conditioned, to sit still. This reflects a Western norm embedded in the context of “listening to a conversation,” reinforced by spatial arrangements specifically designed to support this behavior.

In this new iteration ‘Time-Lapse Edition’ the artist flips that stillness into motion. Instead of holding a single seat, Lisette Ros moves between every possible “seat” in the space, repetitively and ritually. The subtle adjustments she did in the spatial arrangement change the sitting landscape. The intention is to disrupt the default stillness of “audience behavior” and to explore what happens when the seated landscape becomes dynamic—both spatially and socially. This evolving act is guided by bodily and psychological time rather than by clock time or the event ‘In Our Time’s schedule.

What happens when sitting becomes active? When movement becomes the norm?

Reframing Conventions: ‘Time-Lapse Edition’ by Lisette Ros was commissioned by De Balie Amsterdam for ‘In Our Time’, a Forum on European Culture with curator Azu Nwagbogu and artist Tino Sehgal.

Watch snippets of the intervention here (online by De Balie TV).

© Footage by De Balie / Jan Boeve / Viktoryia Kharytonava
© Lisette Ros