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Think Don't Think

American pedestrian signals say WALK or DON'T WALK. In October 2003, Jean-Paul Bagnis and I made the pedestrian crossings of Paris say THINK, DON'T THINK. The city becomes the medium: the white bars turn into lines of writing. Every night, between two and three in the morning, large stencils rolled across the asphalt wrote a sentence chosen for that precise place, a Picasso quotation, a fragment of poetry or an offbeat slogan. Street interviews filmed afterwards showed that it worked: passers-by stopped, read, and answered back. Published in Eye Magazine, the international reference for graphic design. It came to an end outside Dior, the night it took us to the police station.

Read the article in Eye Magazine ↗

Guerrilla campaign

Street interviews

The next day, camera in hand, we filmed passers-by in front of the night's crossings. Without being asked a single question, they read, stopped, commented. Period footage, low definition.

"The chatterbox", in front of the Picasso line "Everything you can imagine is real". Without being asked a single question, he talks for nearly an hour, digression after digression.

Still on the Picasso crossing. A father and his son: the child spotted it first. Then a passer-by who points out, laughing, that Picasso was a great painter but could well have talked nonsense.

In front of "Keep your city clean, eat pigeons". The passer-by was convinced the City of Paris had put it there.