Origins
The story
How a small square of paper stuck up in Marseille ended up on a square in Sucre and inside the imperial city of Huế.
Chapter one
It all started in Marseille
I have been doing urbex and reading walls for far longer than I have been building websites. Marseille suits both: abandoned places you visit with a torch, façades that shed their skin every month, and a city that never asks what you are doing there.
The first stickers went up there, in Marseille and around it — the hills, the villages clinging above the city, Allauch and its windmills. You can still find quite a few in the area, at eye level, on surfaces that belong to nobody.
It was my way of doing street art without damaging anything. A square of paper, a QR code, and behind it a page that goes to whoever scans it first. My art fits in two inches.
Chapter two
Stickers handed to my family
Part of my family travels a lot. I gave them a stack of stickers with a single rule: put them where it is allowed, cover nothing, damage nothing.
They came back with Bolivia, Colombia, and footage I had not asked for. This one is from Sucre: the QR code sits on the frame of the big letters on the square, right at hand height.
That is the moment the project stopped being a Marseille story.
Chapter three
A honeymoon in Huế
Friends were leaving for Vietnam on their honeymoon. They packed stickers without me having to push — I think they were the ones who asked.
The imperial city of Huế: they walked all day before finding the right spot. Someone has scanned it since. I do not know who, and that is exactly the point.
Chapter four
The project stands because of them
Social.Claims has never been pushed by advertising. The people close to me are the ones who took to it first: they found the idea right, they asked the good questions, they suggested things.
A good part of what you see here comes from them — the placement charter, the guestbook, the map by country. They talked about it around them, and that is still how the project gets known today.
The sheets come from Avery, who have printed them cleanly from the start — thanks to them, while we are at it. One square, one purple question mark, and nothing else to announce what sits behind it.
They are not named on this page. That is deliberate: nobody has a name here.
I stay anonymous
The project has no face and will not get one. A sticker that belongs to whoever finds it works badly with an author's name above it.
This is not a pose: it is the rule applied everywhere else on this site. We keep no IP address, we never publish the exact spot of a sticker, and the author is no exception.
Are you a journalist?
Media outlets that want to cover Social.Claims are welcome. Write to me on Instagram: I answer, and I stay anonymous.