The posters read (left) “Zone of brain intoxication” & (right) “Double your profit : demand a new planet”
The French went to the polls on Sunday, March 21, and photographer Sean Hicks captured images of some posters by leftist protesters, who hijacked the illuminated billboards of the Strasbourg Saint-Denis Metro station in Paris just before election day.
According to Creative Review:
… the posters displayed to coincide with the French regional elections on Sunday, which saw Sarkozy receive a severe drubbing from the left. We don’t know if the original ads were removed from the billboards, or if the signs were already empty, but these handmade posters certainly benefit from their brightly lit backdrops.
The style of the posters seem to be conscious of the hand drawn quality of French protest posters of the 1968 general strike — though the recent posters are definitely more text heavy than their predecessors.
According to the commenters on Creative Review, they may be the work of the Stop Pub anti-advertising movement in France (link in French), which one commenter explains:
… has been going in France since 2002/3 they regularly go into the metro and do these kind of actions. They use keys to take the posters out and replace them-the biggest co-ordinated action was when 300 activists defaced, changed and graffitied all the metro stop ads in central Paris whilst the European Social Forum (a gathering of 30,000 anti capitalist activists) was in town in 2003.
See all the posters on Sean Hicks’ Flickstream here (or individual links here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)
Hat tip Public Ad Campaign
