Bouloum, Olivier Mourgue’s anthropomorphic lounge chair, started out as an exercise in imagination and visual poetry. It is based on a seating object cut out of plywood which Mourgue created in 1968. He took it on his travels and photographed the object in settings ranging from the countryside to Manhattan. Bouloum was the nickname of Mourgue’s childhood friend, the photographer Patrick Degommier.
In 1970 Mourgue developed a whole series from this object, including a lounge chair in the same shape and other chairs shaped like a leaf, butterfly, plane, doll, kite, or bird. The Bouloum series was produced by Airborne, for whom Mourgue had been designing furniture since the early 1960s. The Bouloum lounge chairs were used for the French pavilion at the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, where they also served as signage and as seating in a cinema and cafeteria. Today, Arconas produces the Bouloum in a soft, padded version that differs materially and aesthetically from the original with its hard material and sharp lines.
Text: Cloé Pitiot
