Smallest Demonstration Against Unemployment

Background

The European Parliament was organising a TEDx-like conference in Paris on October 15th about 'Perspectives on employment in Europe: innovation and education', with a limited number of seats available. The aim was to attract 'normal' people's attention to the topic and inspire them to take part in the online discussion through social media channels (Twitter, Facebook, blogs and so on) before and during the conference on 15 October.

Idea

The strategy was to start a series of conversations by staging the smallest demonstration ever in Paris. The major issue being addressed was unemployment so each of the mini- installations featured a kind of job where there was a serious skills shortage.

Street installation artist Slinkachu created the miniature scenes, which were placed in different locations around the city.

Each composition illustrated one of the specific skills shortages with the question 'Why is it so hard to find a job'? alongside the hashtag #ReACTParis.

There was also a link to the website where the conference was to be livestreamed on October 15th.

Passers-by were invited to take pictures of the installations and to discuss the issues through their social media channels, using the hashtag. Bloggers and media were invited to meet the artist and talk about the project. The European Parliament promoted Slinkachu's pictures on its own channels (Facebook and Twitter). Slinkachu himself made pictures of all the installations, which he shared on his own social media channels. The pictures were also widely used by the European Parliament to spread the word.

Results

The idea reached 2 million users on Twitter and 20 million users on Facebook (9 million in France, 11 million worldwide). More than 125 posts were uploaded on social media/blogs. On October 15, #ReACTParis became the No.4 trending topic in Paris and No.7 France, leading to over 6,000 hits on the ReACT Paris website, a 28% increase on the European Parliament's Twitter feed (France) and a 10% increase in the number of fans on the European Parliament's Facebook page (France).

Our Thoughts

Is advertising art? Not so long ago the answer was a resounding no. Anything that had a commercial purpose behind it, however artfully it was put together, would always have been regarded as of dubious aesthetic value. Yet increasingly we now see advertising doing more than follow contemporary culture but creating it.

Actually, art has been feeding off advertising ever since Warhol painted his Campbell’s Soup cans. Banksy thinks like an art director rather than a painter and Damien Hirst has a creative department working up his concepts.

I love this idea because it manages to be both playful and deeply serious at the same time. It gets you smiling and then gets you thinking.

If art is the reflection and comment on a particular moment in social history, then this is art as much as Sebastiao Salgado’s photographs of Brazil’s goldmines or even L.S.Lowry’s paintings of workers streaming out from the factories of Northern England.