Competition

Marseilles, April 2019

The common parts of the building are usually cold, utilitarian, empty: they are only made to pass by and deliberately avoid any form of personalization. And then, one day, small black, brown, red and white stickers nestled in the most improbable places: under the door locks, in the elevator and finally, on each floor, near the call button. And soon, new ones appeared, covering the first ones before being replaced in their turn in the conquest of this specific space of attention.
Competition in this illegal advertising ecology is all the more intense because it is so tiny. Large stickers or posters would be immediately removed by residents or the building’s syndic, while the small size offers them a longer average survival time. And this is all the more so since they are particularly sticky, hence a strategy of covering and opacification, rather than tearing off by the mysterious gluers.
How many stickers would it take for a resident who has forgotten his keys to use such services one day? Taken in the urgency of the moment, will s/he trust these “locksmiths” so skilled at opening the doors of buildings and invading quasi-domestic space? It is the bet of this physical spam, provided of course that, when the day comes, it is their number rather than that of the competitors that is clearly visible on the door.