There are, one suspects, easier ways to talk about the end of the world than through a plastic chair. And yet the monoblock turns out to be oddly well suited to the job, at least in the hands of Dan Ortiz Leizman, a multidisciplinary artist who uses it to wrestle with nuclear anxiety, climate collapse, quantum physics, grief and the peculiar business of being human right now.

It helps to know that Dan grew up with a bunker hidden beneath a freezer, stocked with tinned food for the day Dan's father was certain would come. The apocalypse, in other words, was always part of the furniture. It tagged along through philosophy, art and years of nuclear research that eventually landed back on a chair that costs a few pounds.

So we talked about why a plastic chair might outlive us all, what quantum physics has to do with the way we treat one another, how grief found its way into the music — and which comment under one of Dan's posts very nearly made a therapist cry.

— You are often described as a multidisciplinary artist. What disciplines does your practice actually move between?

— I was originally trained in drawing, so I would say that it is my core skill — I draw. But since then, and especially since doing my MFA, my practice has expanded quite a lot. I work with sound art, including the harps, but also other sculptures that involve sound, and live performance has become part of my multidisciplinary practice as well. I really enjoy working with collage and stop-motion animation, so right now my practice moves mostly between drawing, design, sculpture, sound and performance.

Alongside the visual work, I also write and work with critical theory. A lot of that happens through my quantum research group, |SAD>, where we look at queer theory — essentially, ways of questioning fixed ideas around identity and gender — alongside the ethical implications of quantum physics and science. We are particularly interested in where the quantum world overlaps with the social and ethical one, and whether ideas from quantum physics can change the way we think about people, our relationships with one another, responsibility and our place in the world.

The group brings together three very different perspectives: mine, Ar. M Fonlon’s, who is completing a PhD in theoretical chemistry at The Ohio State University, and Susanne M. Winterling’s, an artist, researcher and professor of medium and material-based arts at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

— While we discovered you through your recent work with monoblock chairs, your earlier work explored nuclear weapons and the apocalypse. Does that connect to your interest in the ethical implications of quantum physics and science?

— It is all connected. My research into nuclear weapons led me to the darker outcomes of quantum science — what happens when scientific knowledge becomes tied to power, dominance and control — but also to the question of what other possibilities might exist. What happens if artists take some of those same principles and use them for something other than war or the threat of mutual destruction?

The chairs came into that conversation later. When I first became interested in monoblock chairs, I Googled their history and saw that they dated back to 1946, immediately after the war. That caught my attention. I started thinking about this post-war posture, the period immediately after the nuclear bomb and the enormous existential anxiety that was injected into the human psyche in 1945.

I wondered whether something of that could have become cemented into the body and into this particular posture — especially because the monoblock chair went on to become so incredibly prolific. My original interest was really a hypothesis: I felt there was something about the chair that connected to the existential dread of living in a post-nuclear age.

More recently, I learned that the injection-moulding method used to produce these chairs had itself been developed during the war, or was connected to developments from that period. When I read that, I had this moment of, “Yes, I knew there was something there.” It felt like another piece of the connection I had been following. So that is really how my earlier research eventually trickled down into my interest in the chair.

— What you are talking about is quite dark, and even your Instagram profile is called Apocalypse Phenomenology. When did the apocalypse become such a recurring idea in your work?

— Well, when I first looked at this question, I thought it started at university. But the more I think about it, the more I realise it probably goes back much further.

I was homeschooled, and my mum taught me — she was brilliant. Both of my parents were incredibly smart, but my dad was also convinced that the government was coming for us. He believed martial law was on its way and that we needed to prepare, so we started stockpiling tinned food, powdered milk and other supplies.

We had a room in our basement where we kept everything. My dad sealed it off, cut a hole in the floor and put a freezer on top, so that if something happened, we could shift the freezer and climb down into this hidden bunker where all the food was stored. I was probably about seven at the time. We would go to the shop, the kids with one trolley and my mum with another, and fill both with tinned food.

That was just part of growing up for me — this sense, coming from my dad, that something was on its way and we needed to be ready for it. And looking at the world now, it kind of feels like he was right. He was just about 20 years too early.

Strangely, though, I don't think I took any of it very seriously as a child. It only became something I consciously thought about at university, when I started learning about the history of the country and reading Afro-pessimist theory, which asks who society recognises as fully “human” and who has historically been excluded from that category. Frank B. Wilderson III’s work was important, as was The Undercommons by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. I was reading those while thinking about categories of humanness and non-humanness, how those categories are created and who gets placed within them.

That was when my understanding of the apocalypse started to shift. I realised that the end of the world isn't necessarily one big catastrophe waiting for us in the future. The apocalypse happens all the time: it is in our past, it is happening right now, and it is still to come. For different people, worlds have already ended many times.

That also changed how I understood my role as an artist. If an artist has a public, and that public is being told certain things by governments and other structures of power, then I think the artist has a responsibility to offer something too — hopefully something that can counteract at least some of that harm.

— Do you remember the first moment you knew you wanted to be an artist?

— I think it goes all the way back to when I was a little kid. I was sitting on my grandfather’s knee, drawing a giraffe. I call him Abu — short for abuelo. At some point, he said, “Oh, let me help you,” and erased something I had drawn. Apparently, I completely lost it. I started screaming and crying because he had touched my drawing.

I don’t really remember it myself, so I actually called him yesterday to double-check that I had the story right. But I think that was the moment my family realised, “Okay, this is serious. Nobody is allowed to touch what is going on here.”

My grandfather just turned 88, and when we were talking about it, he told me, “I have never put you down since.” And it is true — he never has.

— And at university, were you already committed to becoming an artist?

— Not entirely. At university, my degree combined philosophy and studio practice, and at the time I was leaning much more towards philosophy. Then COVID happened during my final year, and suddenly the idea of the end of the world didn't feel theoretical at all. My reaction was basically, “This is the end of the world right now. Let's talk about it.”

That was really what pushed me towards art. The philosophical questions stayed, but art became the place where I wanted to work through them.

— What was the first artwork you made that felt truly yours?

— I had been drawing throughout college, but honestly, I hadn't really made anything I would describe as good. Of course, I thought some of it was good at the time, but looking back, there is one work that feels like the moment something shifted.

COVID had just hit Italy, and my school had cancelled all of its study-abroad programmes, although we were still on campus. There was this strange mix of anxiety and disbelief because none of us had experienced anything like it before.

I took a bedsheet, hung it up in my studio, grabbed a paintbrush and ink and just started writing. It was completely stream of consciousness. I don't even remember exactly what I was writing — I think it had something to do with the end of the world — but I wasn't trying to control where it went.

Technically, it was a drawing, but making it on a bedsheet, this incredibly domestic object, felt important. More than anything, though, it was the process that stayed with me: making something without overthinking it, simply because I felt an urgency to get it out. I don't know that the work itself was particularly successful, and I don't think about it very often now, but that way of working opened something up for me.

During COVID, I started painting and drawing more and became interested in asemic writing, where you move your hand as though you are writing but without any semantic content. What comes out is this invented physical language, almost like writing that can't actually be read. That period became the beginning of the practice I have now, even though the work itself has changed a lot since then.

— Okay, let's get back to the monoblock chair. When I was preparing for this interview, I was reading through the comments on your profile and noticed that the chairs seem to trigger a surprisingly emotional, almost nostalgic response. Why do you think people connect with them so strongly?

— That reaction really surprised me. Although, actually, I think I do understand it.

The chair resonates with an enormous number of people simply because it is everywhere. If you search for the world's most ubiquitous objects, the monoblock chair will come up. People from completely different places and backgrounds have some kind of experience with it.

And I think people enjoy discovering that they have experienced something alongside others. It actually brings me back to quantum theory. There is almost this non-local way of gathering around the chair: you don't need to be in the same room with someone to realise that you have shared an experience through the same object. The chair becomes a kind of portal into that feeling of togetherness. You recognise it, somebody on the other side of the world recognises it, and suddenly there is a connection between you, even though your lives may be completely different.

And then there is the sound, which is incredibly powerful. You can put a very simple piece of music over something and suddenly it has the capacity to move people. So there is the nostalgia attached to the chair, but also the emotional power that sound and music bring to it.

And one more thing I would point to is the moment we are in right now. With AI becoming so present in everything, I think people are increasingly hungry for things that feel weird, new and ridiculous. I think all of those things come together in these works, and that is probably my best explanation for why they have resonated so much.

— When you listen to the music you play on the chair constructions, there seems to be a Middle Eastern or Arabic influence to it. Is that something you bring into the music intentionally?

— Not intentionally, although I have noticed it myself and have actually been wondering where it comes from. I have worked with improvisational music on my own for most of my life, and recently I have been paying much more attention to what naturally emerges when I play.

There are a few places it could be coming from. I do listen to a couple of bands from the region that I really like, although I wouldn't say I know Arabic music particularly well. It could also have something to do with the way I tune the instruments. I use what I think would be described as an open tuning, where different strings can be played together and naturally sound good.

— What role has music played in your life beyond your visual practice?

— I have been making music my whole life. When I was a kid, I did musical theatre.

I have also been writing music for most of my life, although I have largely kept that to myself. Music has always been incredibly healing for me. It has got me through a lot of really difficult things, but at the same time, it has always scared me a little.

I was never particularly good at reading music. I took lessons, but I wasn't hugely successful at them and didn't really enjoy that way of learning. So for a long time, I had this feeling that music was going to be for somebody else, even though I desperately wanted it to be for me.

The chairs changed that. They unlocked something for me. I think part of it was suddenly having access to an instrument that didn't have a dogma attached to it. There wasn't an established set of rules telling me exactly how I was supposed to play it, and that gave me the freedom to really dive into music in a way I hadn't before.

I have also been incredibly lucky with the people around me. People have been very generous in giving me space to perform and letting me do shows. Truly, a huge part of the reason I get to do what I am doing right now is simply that other people have been nice to me.

And through all of this, the way I listen to music has started to change too. I am paying much more attention to structure now, particularly loops, improvisation and the ways minimalist and maximalist approaches can work. I have been learning a lot from Philip Glass. Sun Ra is another huge influence. His song Nuclear War really spurred my entire research — that song genuinely changed my life. Jazz more broadly has shaped the way I think about improvisation, which also opens up another conversation with the quantum ideas I am interested in.

— While the work you are making now is still connected to your original ideas around the apocalypse, as we have discussed, a lot of people find it incredibly tangible and emotional. Have you ever thought about renaming your Instagram, Apocalypse Phenomenology, to something a little lighter?

— I actually changed it to Apocalypse Phenomenology after the chair project started. Before that, the account was just under my name.

I think I did it because I could feel the work becoming sweeter, in a way, and I didn't want to lose the urgency behind it or forget where the work had come from. That became especially important when the chairs first started getting really popular online. Honestly, it scared me a little. I am already addicted to my phone, and suddenly a lot of people were paying attention to the work. I really didn't want the project to become about the internet, or simply about the fact that lots of people were looking at it. I wanted to stay grounded in the research behind it.

The “phenomenology” part is really about asking what our experience of the end of the world actually is. If these endings are already happening — if we are seeing atrocities in places like Gaza and Sudan — what does it mean to experience them from completely different parts of the world?

I will see videos coming out of those places and notice someone sitting on a monoblock chair. Suddenly, there is this very ordinary object connecting us. It makes me think about all the different sides of these events and all the different ways people experience them. And there is a personal scale to that as well: how do we hold one another when we might all be going through our own little ends of the world in our personal lives?

There is also an environmental side to the chair that I have thought about from very early on. These chairs are plastic; they are polypropylene. If the climate crisis eventually wipes us out, there is a very real possibility that the polypropylene chairs will still be here. They could become this strange exoskeleton of the human experience — scattered around without us, potentially outliving us, unless they melt.

So for me, the name is a reminder that there is still urgency behind the work. When I realised the project was going to take on this slightly different life online, changing the name was my way of anchoring it back to where it came from. We need to be awake right now.

— There are quite deep ideas behind the work, from war and the climate crisis to this broader idea of the apocalypse. Do you ever feel the need to explain them more explicitly in your captions, rather than leaving people to interpret the chairs in their own way?

— I am honestly still figuring out how and where to talk about those things. It isn’t that I don't want to explain them through Instagram captions; I am just interested in finding other formats that give me more space to flesh those ideas out.

One of those at the moment is The Exoskeleton Zine. I like the format because it feels more democratic — you can make and distribute it wherever you want — while giving me space to go deeper into the ideas behind the work.

— What is the most touching response you have received to the work?

— You know, the work has had an emotional impact on people that I never expected. At one point, somebody told me they had been looking for a reason to stay around, and that this was it. When someone tells you something like that, that personal connection becomes a really powerful reason to keep going with the music.

But there was one comment — you might have seen it — that really stayed with me. Somebody wrote something along the lines of, “This sounds like a hot summer day after we lost somebody.”

That really got me because my immediate thought was, yes, that is exactly what had happened when I first started making the work. Somehow, this person had understood the experience behind it without me ever having to explain it. I actually read the comment to my therapist, and she said, “Oh my God, that just gave me chills. I am going to cry.” And I remember thinking, okay, if you can make my therapist cry, that is pretty good.

— So, did the chair project come out of a difficult period in your personal life?

— I think so. When I first started working with the chairs last August, I was going through the end of a relationship that had been really important to me. My world had ended in a way, and suddenly everything felt new.

There was a lot of uncertainty around other parts of my life too. I was about a year out of grad school and still trying to figure out what I was doing with my life. I almost moved across the country and then decided not to. It felt like everything was up in the air at once.

So when people started picking up on the grief in the work without me ever explicitly telling them it was there, that was amazing. There was this feeling of, “Oh, I can be witnessed.” People I didn't know were somehow hearing something in the work that had come from a very real experience in my life. That meant a lot to me.

— Alongside your artistic practice, you also work as an educator. What does that side of your life look like?

— I teach at the University of Maryland and at Montgomery College, a community college nearby. I teach drawing, 2D design and sculpture, mostly to undergraduate students, although sometimes I also work with senior citizens who are taking classes after retirement.

I absolutely love it. One of my favourite things about teaching is being able to take something I am curious about in my own practice and ask, “How can I turn this into a day of teaching?” Maybe I am interested in zines or optical illusions, and suddenly I get to bring that curiosity into the classroom and see what the students do with it.

Recently, for example, the Department of Art partnered with the Department of Entomology, which has an insect zoo. We brought a tarantula into the drawing classroom and had the students draw it. I haven't been able to stop talking about it. There is something I really love about bringing two seemingly unrelated worlds together and seeing what the students make out of it.

And teaching feeds directly back into my own practice too. I will tell my students, “You can make something really cool in a very short amount of time,” then go back to my studio, not want to make anything, and have to remind myself: no, remember what you just told them. You can make something really cool. You just have to do it.

— How does teaching younger students differ from working with people who have already retired?

— With younger students, I sometimes get the sense that they are scared. They don't always seem to know that it is okay to be themselves in the classroom, to take up space and just exist there as themselves.

With the older students, it is completely different. They aren’t there for a grade. They are there because they already know how wonderful it is to make something, and how wonderful it is to do that alongside their friends. They are completely themselves.

One of my favourite things about working with them is actually very simple: they know how to hang out. That sounds silly, but I really mean it. We can spend an hour eating lunch outside together, just talking and enjoying being there. There isn't that constant pull towards the internet or somewhere else. They are very present, and there is something incredibly refreshing about that.