VIC tells the story of the accommodation to a double hubris, one that Alexandru Popovici, the project initiator, tries to overcome, by exhibiting, paradoxically, both the weapon of irony and the cure of compassion.

The first hubris, the opening hubris, is a Stakhanovite one, commited by the overstandardized and supervised proletary. He is forbidden the elementary gesture of resting on a chair and thus manages, in a confortable and subversive way, to produce a chair himself, more precisely a stool that he uses during working hours. Historically, this is communism, during the presidency of Ceausescu, and the place is the Simerom factory in Sibiu, no longer functional today.

The second hubris is a faustic one: a stool of those proletarians is rediscovered after some years have passed, by a viewer who arrived late at a Faust performance in a hall of the former Simerom factory. The viewer needed a minimum of comfort to watch the play, so he wandered through the deserted factory until he discovered VIC.

Alexandru Popovici takes the familiar object and dares other artists to multiply it. Hence the irony: an object that becomes a protest towards the standardization, mass production and inhuman industrialization needs to be multiplied in 2200 pieces. But to multiply is not to copy, and this is where compassion intervenes: we have 2200 stools because after the Revolution 2200 workers of the former factory were left unemployed.

Alexandru Popovici says: „I said, ok, let’s make 2200 VIC stools, because 2200 unemployed people came out of the former Simerom factory. Part of the money will be given to foundations and associations. There are a lot of small artists and handicraftsmen involved... I don’t seek to be famous. But I agree that sometimes you need an engine, and this is why we invited people who are already well-known, to give impulse and make this movement credible.”

In order to multiply itself in 2200 faces, VIC is a model to the same number of artists and handicraftsmen. VIC is an international project that already produced 40 chairs personalized by artists such as Dan Perjovshi, Alexandru Ciobotariu, Mihai Stănescu, Dorin Ștefan, Șerban Sturza, Radu Cioca, Guillaume Baychelier, David Kramer, Şerban Savu, Mircea Suciu, Cristian Rusu, Felix Deac, Vlad Olariu, Laurent Tourette, Fabien Monestier etc.