Tallinn, 27th april 2012
As a visual artist reflecting about the concept of “Free city” through the idea of open source, I wanted with Meri-Kris and Janeck, who attended my workshop, to invest the public space and create an urban blog in order the people to express themselves in the street.
It was interesting to bring back an old method of communication into the city, a method quite far older than Internet. The blog (web log) picked up the idea of the diary book, but from an intimate sphere of expressing oneself, it becomes public or limited to a small circle of friends through internet; so I took back the idea of the blog and brought it back out of the web, into the city and to the population in order to gather the citizens.
We decided to bring the blog into the public space using the classical yellow post-its. The symbol of the adhesive reminder during these past 30 years, used at home and at work became the small writing place for our urban blog. Then we performed an action of sticking them up in a regular way in order to give also a visual and strong effect.
We chose the bus stops as they are real points of ephemeral aggregation, people stop and wait for their bus. It seemed the ideal place to communicate, take time to explain and involve the persons. The bus stop seemed also the ideal place as they are made of glass and as we could work on the idea of transparency, of outside-inside, of public-private.
Meri-Kris and Janeck, both of them Tallinn citizens, strategically chose the 3 bus stops to invest in 3 different parts of the city in order to try to involve 3 different kinds of population:
1- At the railway station (Kopli)
2- Near some schools (Vabaduse väljiak)
3- In front of a commercial center and cinema, Rotermann area (Narva Maantee)
The action got a good reception, people got involved with curiosity and amusing reactions. People were completely included into the action, they were reactive and interactive. We wanted them to become participative and reflective about their own city, about themselves too, leaving some personal words on the little yellow sheet to the others. It became a discussion and an information wall, a propositive wall, a citizen wall. This was a very important gesture, a gesture of complete liberty of expression.
This workshop humanly brings us a lot. We felt an incredible energy in each place we stuck up, people were different but they all reached the same reaction, diffident at first sight then curious, amusing and participative.
Going back the same evening to one of them (Narva Maantee), I noticed that more than half of the post-its were written or drawing, some people were still writing, and reading all the messages left...
