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Sara Rajaei / Tehran, Amsterdam

An art project that failed….

1- Rustaveli & Mc Donald’s / project proposal for “One stop” project, Tbilisi
In summer 2006 as I arrived to Tbilisi for the first time, my Georgian friend showed me the statue of Rustaveli and said:
Rustaveli wrote the most beautiful verses ever written in the Georgian language...
The yellow & red signs of the Mc Donald’s on the building right behind the sculpture, which were making the sculpture less visible, caught my eyes at the same time.
Till a few years ago, I would say I live by the Rustaveli Square. But since they opened this mc Donald’s, my address also changed to ‘I live by the mc Donald’s’.

I began to think, how Rustaveli as the ‘national poet of Georgia’ was suffering the effect of junk food industry. I decided to work on the same topic for ‘One stop project’, to hold one ‘poetry night’ at the Mc Donald’s building and invite poets and artists along with the costumers to read Rustaveli’s poems and to print his poems on the advertisements in the trays of food, on the cups and all other paper products including the boxes and the wrapping papers. And to finally spread postcards with his poems around the town.

2- The preparations / June-October 2007
In June 2007 the proposal was sent to the project organizers and got accepted.
I was told I’d be able to do it, and that the Mc-Donald’s staff had found it interesting.

The OSI foundation gave us financial support.
In October, just before leaving to Georgia I received an email and was asked to print the Mc Donald’s logo on the flyers and postcards. And I accepted that.
October 3rd 2007 I arrived to Tbilisi. We started to develop a list of people to invite. We began calculating how many of each item we need to print for those certain hours. The opening was set to October 12th.

On the 5th we went to the Mc Donald’s for a face-to-face conversation. I explained that I do not aim to block any part of the building and that we will be there along with the customers just to read poetry. Few hours later we were phoned and told, we won’t be able to print on any of the products, but we still can hold the gathering.
So I had to make some changes in the plan. The decision was to print postcards with signs from Rustaveli’s book on one side, and the Mc Donald’s logo with one of his verses on the other side. Everything was designed in the Mc Donald’s colours, and in a way that if one would not pay enough attention, he/she would see it as a Mc Donald’s ad. I designed 8 postcards and one flyer.
On October 9th and as we were ready to go to the printer, we were once again phoned by the Mc Donald’s. They did not give us the permission to print the postcards, and neither allowed us to gather at their building.

3- One Flop…
The ‘one stop’ invitation cards were printed around the end of the first week, with nearly 50 mistakes on them…
In the front the project title was printed in black on a white background, simple and good. But on the back, spelling mistakes along with typing mistakes…fonts that changed several times, sentences that were not positioned in the right way. Even the names had mistakes in them, plus all the dates, which were wrong.

This was in a way a good example of the way the organization for an art project happens most of the times. At the beginning things are idealistic and there is will for good work to be done, but then happen mistakes after mistakes…
This was a chance not to miss…
I printed the card with all its mistakes on t-shirts. The mistakes that I had found were pointed with red. The front showed the project title the same way, as it was on the card, white and clean.
The back though, a mess…
The project tile, I changed from ‘One stop’ to ‘One flop’…