In the summer of 2006 I was studying in Weimar. The road that I walked to college along every day had been totally dug up, so it was a bit like walking through a building site with machinery, bricks and fluorescent plastic every where.

As well as studying I was also teaching English to earn some cash. This basically involved playing scrabble once a week with four fluent English speaking kids. On one walk to home I realised that there was a certain formal similarity between the new bricks being laid and the scrabble pieces.

I decided to make a scrabble set for the builders. Each night I stole a few bricks from the stack of bricks, took them to the studio, sprayed letters on them and returned them, making sure that the letter side was covered so nothing seemed amiss.

After about a month I had sprayed all the scrabble letters. On the last night I turned the bricks round so the letters were visible. The idea was that the builders would be able to lay words in the pavement, but these words would be invisible to everyone else as they were on the side of the brick.

However, in the space of time between uncovering the bricks and the builders laying them, passers by also started using the bricks as a kind of scrabble set, leaving messages for one another. Some bricks even started appearing at different spots around town, some even in people’s apartments! I am still not sure how many ended up in the pavement…