Swap Meet: Stencils and Stickers

We would like to use this site to collect sticker actions and create a kind of archive of how they operate within various campaigns or guerrilla actions.

We are interested in this because in 1996 we designed a sticker for the prostitutes rights organisation, The Red Thread.

When we met with them to discuss issues around women's rights, they spoke to us about a very practical need. On the windows where prostitutes stand behind, there is usually a sticker reading “No Pictures” , and The Red Thread is the distributor of these stickers. Unfortunately, they had run out and needed to produce more. So we started to brainstorm together about how the sticker could be produced as a solidarity campaign for women. However, finding a way of doing that was not easy because, as an organisation fighting for the rights of prostitutes, The Red Thread isn't really liked by the proprietors of the brothels. We need something that could slip in without being too upfront. Our solution was to make a "No Pictures" sticker with a peel-away backing reading: OUR IMAGE IS OUR OWN.

The slogan, performed through use, operates as a moment of solidarity. It raises a fundamental issue relevant to all women. Ultimately, its about drawing the line or setting the border of "NO" when it comes to owning not only your own body, but also your own representation.

“Could you do for me with your hands…?”

The drawings on the stickers are the visual result of a research on female representation through a survey made on the streets of Rotterdam, where several people were asked to do, using their hands, a symbol of the vagina.

These stickers are only to be pasted and experienced on public toilets. By doing so they become public but at the same time refer to the privacy with which we deal with our own genitalia, the individual vision of the collection, and also to be experienced on a single basis.

comment posted by yomango:

great use of tape (like stickers but on a larger scale) by DINERO GRATIS (=Free Money): a campaign developed in barcelona, spain in occasion of the world economic forum meeting in june 2001 (then canceled because of the wide platform of grassroots movements and collectives opposed to the summit and its politics)

the DINERO GRATIS tape has been later "appropriated" by many other groups in very different kinds of direct action. the tape (still circulating in barcelona) became a shared and really useful tool for all the social movemnts in barcelona. and a great way to make a whole discourse (non work, labor and social precarity, basic income) visible.

images and texts at:
http://www.eldinerogratis.com/

I will also take the t-shirts I have made together with my feminist group of artistic intervention: ZOiNA. These t-shirts present different ways of depicting women and the female body by reworking, altering and questioning images from fashion magazines, the result is then printed on the t-shirts by using the technique of stencil graffiti.

Thinking about loss or abscence and how that can be visualized, I remembered this image which I'd once seen in a magazine:

An action for the desaparecidos or those that disappeared in Argentina from 1976 to 1978 under General Jorge Rafael Videla. Each silhoette has a name written on it, their age and the time they disappeared.

I am also bringing stencils related to female representation and will be making them on the spot. My idea is to give kind of "how-to" lessons and exchange stencils with others.

The idea is that I can stencil my city with your stencils and you can stencil your city with mine.

Last year Zoina did a project called Urban Body in Linz in collaboration with Transpublic, an artist run space. We graffittied and stenciled areas around beauty centers, sex shops, and clothing shops with images of or text of women taken from magazines.

action in front of a military shop:

action on the main shopping street of Linz: