I was quite surprised when Alexandru Popovici approached me to do a chair. It was for a wide-spread art-project that he had concocted, called “Very Important Chair“. This is what the project is all about, in Alex’s words:
“It all happened when a worker from Simerom, the former factory of machine tools from Sibiu, (1921-#2009) wanted to sit down to have lunch and to rest between the two production cycles. Back then resting was not seen as something to appreciate.
<< Even during the holidays we were forced to work, but we were coming with food and spritzer and the machine tools were idling, and much damage was done>>. The workers, by creating some artifacts to comfort them for the lack of both spiritual and physical comfort, showed resilience and creativity in a political context of uniformity.
The stools were thus designed to be easy to hide behind a pillar or cabinet in order to get unharmed from an unbelievable hide-and-seek game between the chair and the administrative body. This is how an army of chairs appeared at Simerom, each of them distinctive and improvised with accessible materials, ergonomic and full of revolutionary spirit.
These workers defeated the absurd rigidity of a regulation and managed to humanize an <<industrial>> time laps, sitting on <<the fetish chair>> to have a simple lunch, arranged on a simple metallic table covered only with the page of a newspaper.
Using the basic concept of “personalization”, I will reproduce the only chair found at Simerom after the plant was close with as many collaborators as possible (artists, handicrafts, intellectuals) in 2200 copies. The chairs will be named Very Important Chairs, V.I.C. to evoke the resistance to industrial leveling- homogenization and lack of humanity.”
From this initial prototype, emerged the idea of artists echoing the concept, to produce an array of “statements” to embellish and complement what Alex started. For me, the surprising part was that along with myself were top-tier representatives of the art world, including my university mentor Dorin Stefan. I didn’t know how to go about it. I thought of Mies’s famous quote – “It doesn’t have to be interesting. It has to be good.” and went at it the other way around. This was no comfortable and viable chair, it was the “chair-geist” that I wanted to address. But, since Mies was on my mind, form eventually did follow function. And what is that function, if not the simple embodiment of the most prevalent of directions: (sitting) down.
To build it, I enlisted the help of one very savvy maker – Gelu Lixandru, and bought two used 5kg gym-weights. There’s a chair that you don’t want to knock over. The bottom part (foot-rest) can be adjusted up and down on the filleted central shaft.
The chair is a vector. If we remove ourselves even for one moment from our self-centric perspective, we can realise that each moment the Earth has to bear us. Billions of tiny little vectors dragging away (according to Newton’s law) at the planet and being dragged, in turn, towards it at the same time. It’s liberating, really, being described simply as a vector of gravity, receiving no more special treatment or expectations than an ordinary rock. The one thing that eludes this simple model is thought. Weightless and free, they float unbound as we are, to a point of action-reaction on the Earth’s crust. They travel from person to person, exchanged and multiplied, with no regard to natural law. The body is their anchor, the chair is our anchor. Let’s take a seat and think about it.
Design is Bravery 