Millions of us are stuck at home with nowhere to go and no one to see. Our home has become our work, our school, and our recreational space. And by proxy, the living room couch has grown more important, too. It’s the Swiss Army knife of cushioned seats, a place where we can take a board meeting or binge on Netflix.
To pay tribute to the upholstered hero of the moment, artist Max Siedentopf has built the world’s longest couch. Hosted on a site called So Far Sofa, the couch is not one couch but many couches contributed by many people. The subjects sit with their pets, meditate, and eat—one person is even dressed in a full lobster costume. Each frame is stitched to the next in this photo series to create the sensation that all of us are sitting upon the same, endless piece of furniture, together.
“I think the series plays a lot with fear of missing out and shows that even if we’re stuck at home alone, everyone is in exactly the same boat, or rather sofa,” says Siedentopf. “I think over the past years we were incredibly focused on us as individuals, but hopefully this time will make us a bit more empathetic to other people and give more of a sense of unity and togetherness. The sofa is a small start to that.”
The couch is currently about 100 couches long, which you can explore by scrolling right on the page. But its length needn’t stop there. You can go to the site and upload your own photo (a simple tool lets you resize your couch to line up with the existing one). At that point, you will have added to the project, but you will also have placed yourself onto the world’s longest couch, right alongside everyone else.
When I ask how long the sofa could go, curious if there was some limit on the backend code of his site that might cap the image size, Sidentopf teases me that, “I think the limit will be around seven billion when we start running out of sofas.”
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