Everything You Need to Know About Vera Lindholm-Achebe's Chairs Nobody May Sit On

The assistant is dusting a chair with a make-up brush when she asks me to step back. I am forty centimetres away. The chair is pale ash with a grey felt seat cut at a slope of eleven degrees. Its name is Chair 9. Nobody may sit on it.

Here is what you need to know. Vera Lindholm-Achebe has made nine chairs since 2023, in a studio in Södermalm with one window and a radiator that knocks. Every chair is built to hold a person. Seat height 45 centimetres, width 41. She tests each one with a 90-kilo sandbag for a full day. Then she retires it from sitting.

Why? Her answer, at four in the afternoon with the light already gone: "A chair is the only object we ask to be useful by being ignored. I wanted one that gets looked at." It is a good sentence. She has clearly said it before.

The price is 62,000 kronor. Each chair comes with a linen cord to tie across the seat, like a hotel corridor in a film. Eleven pieces have sold across the series. Two buyers sent the cord back.

Now my part. In the autumn of 2022 I told a room of forty people that chairs would disappear entirely by 2026. Floors, ledges, bean-shaped cushions, the whole body going horizontal. I had a slide. The slide said ninety percent. I was wrong in the most expensive way possible: chairs did not disappear. They were promoted. They are now the most stared-at objects in the city, and nobody is allowed to use them. Somewhere a person who disagreed with me in 2022 is being unbearable about it.

Is the work good? The joinery on the back leg of Chair 9 is the best I have seen this year. The felt is lovely. But the idea fits in one sentence, and an idea like that makes a certain number of chairs. Chair 9 is the same joke as Chair 2 with better feet. A tenth would be a habit.

I asked the assistant what happens if someone sits. She said it has happened once. A man in a good coat, a Tuesday in September. The chair held. "That," she said, "was the worst day we have had in this studio."