The information we take in daily via our smartphones and social media has not been objective for a long time. The ‘news’ is personally slanted for each of us, and the echo chambers of internet forums are an ideal breeding ground for misinformation and conspiracy theories. This is something Jeroen Jongeleen is fully aware of. In addition, he believes that in the past decade, the streetscape, in the Netherlands at least, has been the setting for far less civic awareness than in the past.

He sets out into the city to put up new ‘emancipatory’ slogans using black spray paint. He places the slogans on, for instance, a supermarket trolley that has been sitting idly in the same free parking lot for years, a temporary fence or construction site that’s been put on pause, looking carefully for locations where pedestrians will be confronted by these texts. Most of these have been sprayed onto fabric collected near the port in Rotterdam and relocated to create a conversation with people he’ll never meet.

Jongeleen takes his ‘slogans’ from social media posts that appear in his feed to communicate about the largest problems of our time. This is the clickbait for articles published in leading international newspapers and magazines. Short snippets of text from longer, more in-depth pieces in for example, Der Spiegel, Huffington Post or The New York Times, which come across as the very opposite of the fast, rambling, utterly subjective and self-obsessed pieces of information that eventually reach us when shared via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the like.

To an extent, Jongeleen chooses his quotes for their poetic value: after all, set in capital letters in the streetscape, they add a whole new layer to ‘reality’. They put forward a critique of the state of the media and highlight our own responsibility in this regard. At the same time – as is usual with the artist – they also constitute a call to passers-by. If you look up the quotes, you will find the original article after a bit of research. ‘FUKUSHIMA IS READY FOR TOURISM AGAIN’ comes from an article on a CNN news page that evokes the rather intriguing promotion of mass tourism in a ravaged and dangerous zone during the outbreak of the international Covid wave. ‘THE MORE INFORMATION THAT IS OUT THERE, THE EASIER IT IS TO ALLOW APOPHENIA TO GUIDE US INTO ANYTHING’ comes from an analytical article by The Street about the far-right American conspiracy cult QAnon. The quotes point to the dark side of contemporary society: the increasingly pressing climate issue, political scandals, abuses carried out in military operations or our excessive and self-destructive consumer habits.

Besides exhibiting them in the cityscape as a clandestine intervention, Jongeleen likes to show photographic recordings of the works in art spaces. Unlike in the street, where the information reaches passers-by in a very brief and codified manner, in the art space there is room for discourse, room to delve deeper and discuss the subjects and thoughts these slogans map out.