The sticker as a vulnerable sticky cultural heritage: ‘I will pay you back on Monday’

Unfortunately, a beautiful sticker that hung there for years recently disappeared from the curl (a urinal) at the Torensluis in Amsterdam. It showed a curly haired man looking at you with a challenging look. Above that the text: ‘Your cash on delivery lundi‘: I’ll pay you back on Monday. You immediately understand, from the young man’s look, that you can forget it: he is not going to pay you back on Monday. Not on Monday and not ever.

Who the ‘Your cash on delivery lundi‘ sticker is unknown. You can find it in various European cities. The first appeared in Brussels around 2010, reported Vice.

That magazine made a vain attempt to find the maker. It did find an anonymous one Brussels site with the title ‘Your cash on delivery lundi‘, where you can buy the sticker, a T-shirt and follow-up stickers (‘lundi promis‘: Monday, promise). It looks like it’s a deliberately mysterious sticker, to tell a story, a urban legendabout creating a non-refundable type ((self-portrait of the artist?) That worked out well.

The anonymous sticker-Banksy depicting the ‘Your cash on delivery lundi‘ sticker, has created a highlight of contemporary European sticky cultural heritage. Image and text together strongly evoke a grating, melancholic feeling of despondency. About broken promises. In friendships. But I also thought of the benefits affair, where victims are repeatedly given empty promises: we will pay you back! Real. Monday.