Friday, April 4, 2008

Project Smile

I'm embarking on my first guerrilla art project. Well it's not so much art as words, but basically it's inspired by this website, You Are Beautiful. I know I read about this website on someone's blog but for the life of me I can't remember who it was, so thankyou if it was you!

Basically the idea of the You are Beautiful project is for people to print out those stickers and just stick them all over the place where people will see them, then you take a photo of it and send it in to the site. I like the basic message behind the whole thing, and I know that if I saw a "You are beautiful" sticker on a lamppost in the street it would make me smile even though I'd know it wasn't intended specifically for me.

So I thought I'd take this a step further and put a heap of inspiring mini phrases on some sticky labels and stick them around the place. I couldn't get the big sheets that you can print on to, but in hindsight I like them handwritten, it's more personal, although it makes me nervous that people could recognize my handwriting, as silly as that is!

Most of the 'phrases' are more like little reminders, things like "Make someone smile", "Love is everywhere", "Be kind to yourself" etc. Nothing too complicated or corny, just little things that sometimes we forget, and personally I find it nice to be reminded every now and then. I haven't told anyone about this project, because honestly I'm a bit scared that I'll be too chicken to do it, and if I do I'll be so nervous and embarrassed that I won't take a photo of where I put them.

So basically I'm putting this up on here so that I have a bit of a public accountability thing going on, and hopefully it will make me actually do it! Maybe if I start off at night or in less exposed places I'll build up the courage to actually photograph the whole thing.

Anyway we'll see, feel free to join in if you like, or take on your own little guerrilla art project, anything to make this concrete world a little more happy and smiley!

2 comments:

CurlyPops said...

That's a fantastic idea. You probably saw it on Pigeon Pair and Kootoyoo blogs.

Fibo said...

ah yes it would have been kootoyoo, thanks curlypops! I still haven't done it yet haha, although I did do a bit of a letterbox drop of the "you are beautiful" papers, hoping that people would maybe think they had a secret admirer and felt a bit special for a moment, I know something like that would make me feel super special :)