Dan Ortiz Leizman turns plastic chairs into string instruments
The plastic monobloc chair has become so embedded in everyday life that it often escapes notice altogether. It sits on porches, outside cafés, at family gatherings, schoolyards, campsites, community events, and roadside restaurants. Found across continents and cultures, it is one of the few designed objects almost everyone recognizes, not because of who designed it, but because of how completely it has dissolved into daily life.
For artist and educator Dan Ortiz Leizman, that familiarity became impossible to ignore. In their ongoing project, MONOBLOC HARPS, they take discarded plastic chairs and turn them into playable string instruments, inviting audiences to encounter an object they thought they already knew through sound instead of function. The chair remains a chair, yet the addition of strings asks visitors to stop, touch and listen.
The project was conceived unexpectedly during a residency at The Cannery, an experimental sound center and bassoon-making studio in Maine. Ortiz Leizman was researching postwar aesthetics and American nuclear politics when three ordinary white chairs in the studio began to take on another meaning. Around the same time, they had found a horseshoe crab exoskeleton washed ashore, becoming fascinated by the idea of a shell that remained after its inhabitant had disappeared. The monobloc chairs began to echo that image. ‘I started seeing them as a post-war object that cemented — or plasticized, really — a global existentialism into the posture of sitting,’ they share with designboom during our interview.
Ortiz Leizman performs on a MONOBLOC HARP during Sound Scene 2026: Distant Mirror hosted by the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden | image courtesy of the artist
how ‘MONOBLOC HARPS’ reimagines the ubiquitous chair
That realization opened into a much broader investigation. The chair appeared everywhere in their studio practice, from drawings and cyanotypes to stop-motion animations. The more they worked with it, the more people began responding with stories of their own. What surprised them most was how often those memories returned to childhood. ‘People started noticing this sort of crazy repetitive nonsense I was doing and messaging me with stories of what the chair reminded them of, mostly stories from childhood,’ the Maryland-based artist tells us. ‘I felt like I was finally understanding how to make work that people could relate to in a way that pulled on personal emotion while also calling to this greater feeling of togetherness that we can understand through the ubiquity of the chair.’
The instrument came almost by accident. During a creative block, Ortiz Leizman dismantled an old ukulele for parts and began attaching its strings to a monobloc chair. That improvised studio experiment quickly revealed another layer. The chair could become something active. Instead of supporting the body, it could resonate with it.
Watching someone encounter one of the instruments follows a familiar rhythm. There is a moment of hesitation, then curiosity, and finally the impulse to pluck a string. For Ortiz Leizman, that instinct to play is essential. It creates a space where people feel comfortable questioning the assumed purpose of an object. ‘Play leans into a kind of improvisation that we consider safe,’ they explain. ‘It emboldens people to let their guard down.’
One of the MONOBLOC HARPS installed at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden during Sound Scene 2026: Distant Mirror hosted by the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden | image courtesy of Carolyn Zaldivar Snow
play, participation, and everyday objects
Dan Ortiz Leizman is less interested in play as entertainment than as a way of testing the limits of familiar systems. Games have rules, objects have intended functions, and everyday life is shaped by countless invisible parameters. By turning perhaps the world’s most ubiquitous chair into an instrument, they remind us that even the most ordinary things are open to reinterpretation. The same openness guides their own creative process, which is built on observation. ‘I try to learn one new thing every day, whether it’s through realizing that I can mimic bird song on the chairs, or watching a film and studying the score, or going for a walk and finding a new set of monoblocs on a neighbor’s porch that I never noticed before,’ they describe. ‘I find that the more I cling to a pre-planned idea of a result, the worse the outcome is. Active listening plays a huge role when I’m composing and playing. But it’s a constant practice.’
The artist believes humor and curiosity make people more receptive to ideas they might otherwise overlook. ‘I actually think entertainment is a wonderful entry point to creating meaningful experiences with people through art,’ Ortiz Leizman explains. ‘A big challenge that artists and designers take on, especially nowadays with dwindling attention spans and increasing screen time, is how to initiate profound experiences with audiences when they’re not necessarily expecting it.’
The artist spends much of their time teaching students to work with found materials, seeing them as ways of paying closer attention to the objects already surrounding us. ‘Especially as AI is saturating our educational and creative worlds, I feel an urgency to make work, and lead others in making work that feels human.’ they highlight. ‘What is more human than renegotiating our interactions with the objects that we have such intimate everyday encounters with?’
Yet despite the project’s playful premise, audiences often respond to the work in unexpectedly emotional ways. Ortiz Leizman began building the instruments while navigating a difficult personal period, though grief was never explicitly addressed in the work itself. Instead, it surfaced through the responses of strangers. ‘I don’t think the people who comment things like, ”this is the sound of the hot summer after you just lost someone,” realize that’s exactly where the work came from,’ they share. ‘It’s been incredibly healing for me to be able to share these experiences with so many people through the work.’
Ortiz Leizman tunes a MONOBLOC HARP before a performance | image courtesy of Elile Kebede
sound carries memory beyond words
For Dan Ortiz Leizman, play and grief are closely related forms of improvisation. Both ask people to navigate uncertainty without a script, responding intuitively to circumstances they cannot fully control. Music simply becomes the medium through which those experiences can be shared. ‘One of my favorite facts about sound is that it is just vibrations,’ Ortiz Leizman reflects. ‘When you hear the voice of someone you love through the phone, in a way it’s like they’re physically reaching you through the vibrations sent through the air. Sound is an invisible physical thing! It’s just so special. I don’t know that I can say what role sound can play en masse, but I hope that we can all get a little bit better at listening a little bit more of the time. I hope that the notion of sound as a physical player can help people feel more connected to their environments when they hear the wind blow through the trees or a car driving by or the dishes clanking in the sink.’
The same could be said of MONOBLOC HARPS. The project asks one of the world’s most familiar objects to vibrate differently. Through a small physical intervention, a piece of plastic furniture becomes an instrument for gathering, listening, remembering, and imagining other possibilities — proof that even the most familiar objects still have the capacity to surprise us. ‘Music really is like a drug, it holds so much power to bring people together, to make people
cry, to depress or elevate a mood. If the monobloc harps have taught me anything, it’s that a little bit of music can transform something as simple as a plastic chair into a catalyst for embodying the distinctly human experiences of grief, joy, gathering, and play. When we connect to those experiences, we become capable of making the world
a little bit better,’ the artist concludes.
artist Dan Ortiz Leizman with a monobloc chair in the background | image courtesy of Elile Kebede
Ortiz Leizman’s collage series pairs the chair with vintage National Geographic photographs
coral reef imagery appears within the familiar outline of the monobloc
a wildfire scene fills the silhouette of the ubiquitous plastic chair
the monobloc chair becomes a frame for archival imagery
project info:
name: MONOBLOC HARPS
artist: Dan Ortiz Leizman | @apocalypsephenomenology
photographer: Elile Kebede | @insidethedarkroom_, TikTok: @insidethedarkroom_
This interview is part of designboom’s PLAY chapter, exploring what would happen if form didn’t follow function, but pleasure. Discover more stories that celebrate joy, imagination and playfulness here.