Mailboxes

Describe your idea and concept of your work in relation to the festival outlines:

From the beginning our task was to encourage people to take back public places by unsanction repair/improvement of urban environment. But at some point we decided that to properly advocate peoples interests we need to establish connection/feedback from all the different groups of people (including kids and older people, who don't use internet and smartphones). As a part of series of May Intervention (http://eng.partizaning.org/?p=2475) and later series of Cooperative workshops in Moscow districts we installed 15 yellow mailboxes in different part of the city with the inscription that says: "Write what is missing in your area and drop a message in the box. We will make a map of the problems and wishes, we will try to fulfill them or find someone who could do it better than we could. The program Citizens for Citizens. We collect opinions, complaints and suggestions and try to execute them solely on enthusiasm. Nobody is paying us for it. So remember that the many things that bother you can be fixed by your own hands."

What kind of communication approach do you use?

DIY-navigation, social media and other medias as a platform for discussion of complains and ideas from people. All the results we used during summer workshops in 2012 to advocate people's interests. In couple of the districts in cooperation with our friends and partners we established pop-up forums/cinema theaters made of shipping pallets to discuss mails and following interventions with locals.

What are in your opinion concrete benefits to the society because of your communication?

Our main goal is to promote idea of grass roots/participatory urban re-planning and encourage people to fix issues or, at least, think of what and how things in the city could be improved not according to some experts opinion but to those, who will actually use it. We believe that people better know what their cities/districts need and our role is to properly moderate the process of their decision making. As a result of this half-year long experiment we conducted hundreds of mails that provided us information about real peoples needs. Some of these requests we used for our own interventions, some of them was sent to city authorities, who fixed some of them. Also we showed mailboxes and selected mails at the exhibition in the end of the year.

What did you personally learn from creating your submitted work?

That people actually know what they want, that they smart and ready to work/help if you know how to properly ask them for.

Why is your work, GOOD communication WORK?

Probably this is not the perfect example of the work with pure communication component, but we perceive all the following discussions in media, blogs, and on the city streets as a part of our project. Our methodology is to make interventions in public spaces to start a dialogue between different groups of people and the Mailbox project is one of them, that probably more then others have participatory component and involve people not only to use our art, but also actively co-create content.

Where and how do you intent do implement your work?

Mailbox is an open-source tactic that people and organizations are welcome to use in public spaces of their cities. Our mailboxes was installed without any sanctions in busy places near metro-stations and other local epicenters of city life.

Did your intervention had an effect on other Media. If yes, describe the effect? (Has other media reported on it- how? Were you able to change other media with your work- how?)

Our projects as DIY-city navigation and unsunction repair often get attention from people and media, and in many ways change the discourse around art/urbanism in the city. The Mailboxes became a very successful tool and as a part of May Intervention series was covered by many Russian and some of the western media. For example: http://rt.com/art-and-culture/partisans-zebra-crossing-bench-820/