Agora of Shadows

Erasmus+ Youth Exchange, KA152-YOU

Agora ofShadows

Η Αγορά των Σκιών · Υπερασπιζόμαστε τη Δημοκρατία

Democracy began as an argument between people who could see each other. For ten days on the north coast of Evia, twenty-eight young people from four countries take apart the media that reaches them, and then teach two generations of their neighbours to do the same.

7–16 July 2027ten days
Rovies, Evianorth coast
34from four countries
18–26ages
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Look again

There is a smear across the bottom of this painting.

For nearly five centuries visitors have walked past it. Two wealthy men, a table of instruments, and something wrong on the floor.

Look again

Move, and the smear becomes a skull.

Holbein painted it in 1533 so that it can only be read from one place in the room. The picture did not change. Your position did.

And that is what this project is about

Most of it is not a lie. It is an angle.

What reaches young people is usually true material arranged to produce a conclusion it does not support. This project teaches nobody what to think. It gives them names for the tools.

The need

They can tell. They cannot say how.

Young people form their opinions inside a private feed, arranged by a system nobody has explained to them, where the loudest emotion travels furthest and the answer comes from a stranger under no obligation to be honest.

What reaches them is usually true material arranged to produce a feeling: a real photograph with the year removed, a real quote with the question cut off, a percentage that never says what it is being compared to. This project teaches nobody what to think. It gives them names for the tools.

“Young people experience difficulties to verify the accuracy and reliability of information.”European Youth Goal #4 — Information & Constructive Dialogue

They can tell. They cannot say how.

Young people in our networks describe the same thing again and again: they can tell when something is trying to move them, they cannot say how, and they cannot explain it to anyone else.

Tiredness, not scepticism

What follows is the assumption that everything is manipulated and nothing is worth checking. It looks like critical thinking and behaves like withdrawal — and withdrawal is exactly what an authoritarian information strategy is built to produce.

It does not land evenly

In 2024, 24.1% of 15 to 29 year olds in the EU — some 17.3 million people — were at risk of poverty or social exclusion. Manipulation works best on people who already have grounds to believe the system was not built for them.

You cannot see the edges of your own information space

Everyone around you shares its assumptions. Put four countries in one room with the same European story printed four ways and the shape of your own becomes visible at once. No national workshop can do that.

Why the week starts with fiction

V for Vendetta and The Hunger Games give four national groups one shared reference in the first hour: a state that governs by controlling the broadcast, a spectacle that keeps a hungry population watching, a mask that makes a message travel.

Fiction also creates distance. Nobody defends the party they voted for when the subject is Panem, and that makes an honest conversation between four countries possible on the first day rather than the fifth. From there the discussion moves to real European examples, brought by the participants themselves.

“Words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth.”V for Vendetta (2005) — the epigraph this application opens with

Shadows on the wall

The method, in ninety seconds

On the third working day participants spread five real pieces of media on the ground — five each, brought from their own country — sort them by what they do rather than what they are about, and build the technique wall. Below is a demonstration of the same exercise. The article is invented. The techniques are not.

Move the light across the wall

On the wall behindFrancisco Goya, The Third of May 1808, 1814 · Museo del Prado
A lantern on the ground decides who is visible and who is not. It is not a metaphor we chose lightly.

Workshop specimen — not a real article

Rural exodus: 41% of young people have already gone

Experts warn the countryside is emptying, and nobody is coming back.

A new report shows that 41% of people aged 18 to 29 no longer live in the region where they were born. Officials called the figure alarming.

The mood on the ground is bleak. “There is nothing here for us,” said one young resident who asked not to be named.

Two analysts disagree about the cause. One points to the cost of housing. The other says young people have lost their sense of national identity.

A black and white newspaper reproduction of three women stooping to gather grain in a harvested field.
A deserted village square this week.

Published 14:20 · 4,100 shares · Share it before it is too late.

Choose a technique. It will light up inside the article.

Six techniques, one true article

Έξι τεχνικές, ένα αληθινό άρθρο

Every sentence in the article beside this could be true. That is the difficult part. A lie can be corrected. True material arranged to produce a conclusion it does not support has to be named before it can be answered.

In the week: participants build this wall themselves, one poster per technique with a real example from another country underneath. It stands all week and it opens the toolkit.

Six to eight techniques, named by the participants themselves, with real examples from four countries. The aim is not suspicion. It is judgement.

Day four · The Capitol’s edit

One true picture. Three true captions. Three different countries.

Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners, 1857. Three women stoop to gather leftover grain in the foreground; behind them stand loaded carts, high stacks of harvested wheat, a mounted overseer and a village.
Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners, 1857 · Musée d’Orsay

Edit A · The countryside is dying

“Nothing left to gather”

Crop to the three women. Bent, near-empty handed, in a field that is finished. Every word of the caption is true of what you can see.

Edit B · Record harvest

“The best year of the decade”

Crop to the background of the same painting. Loaded carts, stacks of wheat taller than a person, an overseer on horseback, a village at work. Same painting. Same day.

The whole frame

Both were always in the picture

Millet painted poverty and abundance in one field, and the distance between them is the subject. Neither caption lies. Both crop. That is the lesson of the fourth day, and the participants do it themselves with a real news story from their own country.

Scroll to change the edit

The two-minute check

Four questions that fit on a bus

The project’s second objective is a habit, not a piece of knowledge. The routine is drilled daily on live material until it takes under two minutes on an ordinary phone. It costs nothing and it survives the journey home.

Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656. A painter stands at a large canvas whose face we cannot see, a court gathers in the room, and the king and queen appear only as a reflection in a mirror on the far wall.
Who is standing whereDiego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656 · Museo del Prado
We never see the canvas he is painting. The royal couple exist only as a reflection. The first question of any check is the same one: who published it, and from where are they looking.

Participants also learn what they hand over to a platform and what they can decline, and exercise one real right over their own data at least once during the week.

Six objectives

Six groups in one painting. None of them stands alone.

Each objective is written so that it can be checked: at the end of the week it either exists or it does not. Choose a detail.

Objective I

Name it, then explain it

Every participant names and recognises at least six manipulation techniques in real media from four countries, and can explain each one to somebody who has never heard of it.

Objective II

A habit, not a lesson

A verification routine that works on an ordinary phone in under two minutes, so that checking before sharing becomes routine rather than an exception.

Objective III

From taking part to facilitating

Every participant co-designs and delivers a media literacy session for an audience that is not their own age group. The moment you have to explain it to a seventy year old is the moment you find out whether you understood it.

Objective IV

Their own data, their own analysis

Participants design and run an intergenerational poll with local young people and older adults, and analyse the difference themselves. The results are published with the toolkit.

Objective V

Back to democratic values

Participants can argue why a manipulated information space damages equality, the rule of law and their own freedom — concretely rather than abstractly.

Objective VI

Something anyone can run

A free toolkit of session plans in two age versions, which any youth worker or teacher can run with no training, no budget and no software.

The six detailsRaphael, The School of Athens, 1509–1511 · Apostolic Palace, Vatican

Ten days

One arrival day, eight working days and a departure day.

1

7 Jul

Arrival

Άφιξη

The four groups arrive and are met on site by the project team. The site and emergency briefing is given together with the campsite staff: the layout, the gate, the rules for the sea, the local emergency numbers.

Everyone receives a card with the nearest health centre and pharmacy, the coordinator’s number and the numbers of all four group leaders.

What the day produces

Everyone on site, briefed, with a contact card in their pocket.

  • welcome
  • safety briefing

2

8 Jul

The agora

Η αγορά

Name games, human bingo and trust exercises, then the programme, Erasmus+, Youth Exchanges and Youthpass. The five competences are named on the first day, so that everyone knows what to watch for in themselves while it is happening.

The group writes its own code of conduct, including the right to step back from any activity without giving a reason, and the rule that questions come before counterarguments. The last block is the first agora: chairs in a circle under the trees, one question — who decides what you see?

What the day produces

The code of conduct, the four mixed teams, and a wall of claims nobody can prove.

  • icebreakers
  • group contract
  • agora circle
  • Youthpass launch

3

9 Jul

Shadows on the wall

Σκιές στον τοίχο

In the shaded working area, participants unpack the five pieces of media each brought from home, sort them by what they do rather than what they are about, and build the technique wall: one A2 poster per technique, with a real example from another country underneath.

Inside, in the one session that needs a screen, the broadcast scene from V for Vendetta is taken apart shot by shot: technique, emotion, ask.

What the day produces

The technique wall. Six to eight techniques with worked examples. It stands all week and it opens the toolkit.

  • sorting on the floor
  • peer analysis
  • film deconstruction

4

10 Jul

The Capitol’s edit

Το μοντάζ του Καπιτωλίου

Each team takes one real story about money, housing, work or migration and re-edits it three ways for three audiences, using true facts only and changing nothing but selection, order and wording.

Then a walking debate along the shore on where editing becomes lying, and a session on spectacle framed by The Hunger Games: who is filmed, who is watching, who is invisible. The intercultural evening closes the day.

What the day produces

Three edits per team. All of them true, none of them the same.

  • re-editing
  • walking debate
  • intercultural evening

5

11 Jul

The mask and the watcher

Η μάσκα και ο παρατηρητής

Participants map their data trail from the previous twenty-four hours: what they saw, what they clicked, what they gave away. Two volunteers then consent to being profiled by the group using public material only, with an agreed stop word. It is stopped early every time, and that is the point of the exercise.

The verification routine is drilled on live material until it takes under two minutes, and participants make masks from reused card carrying what they show outside and what they hide.

What the day produces

A personal data map each, a routine that works, and twenty-eight masks.

  • data mapping
  • consented profiling
  • verification drill
  • mask making

6

12 Jul

Designing the agora

Σχεδιάζοντας την αγορά

The two crews of fourteen work at opposite ends of the site, each planning a ninety minute session: one for local young people and one for older adults. Short inputs on what makes a question open, on facilitating people much older than you, and on consent in polling.

The teams write the twelve-question poll, then each crew runs its session on the other and gets questions rather than advice.

What the day produces

Two session plans and the poll instrument, written by the participants.

  • session design
  • peer rehearsal
  • questionnaire design

7

13 Jul

The community day

Η ημέρα της κοινότητας

The crews run their sessions in parallel at two village venues, with roughly twenty-five local young people and twenty-five older adults. Participants facilitate. Group leaders and facilitators observe and do not step in unless asked.

The poll is completed on paper at the end of each session — a form in a room of seventy year olds gets a far higher response rate than a link. In the evening the two crews compare what happened.

What the day produces

Around fifty poll responses and two workshops in the village, facilitated entirely by young people.

  • peer facilitation
  • intergenerational work
  • paper polling

8

14 Jul

Reading the results

Διαβάζοντας τα αποτελέσματα

Teams process the poll by hand, tallying closed answers on flipcharts and clustering open answers on cards, so that the comparison is built by the participants rather than presented to them.

They then write the age-specific activity pairs: four themes, each with a version for a room of teenagers and one for a room of older adults, carrying the same learning point. Each national group also fixes the date of its workshop back home.

What the day produces

The toolkit content, and four dates in four countries.

  • hand analysis
  • co-writing
  • follow-up planning

9

15 Jul

The public agora

Η δημόσια αγορά

The group sets up a temporary agora in the village square from what it has already made — the masks, the technique wall and one open question board — and invites passers-by to answer. It reaches people who would never attend a workshop.

Back on site: the Youthpass self-assessment, certificates and evaluation, then the farewell evening.

What the day produces

A public agora in the square, and twenty-eight Youthpass certificates naming real work.

  • public action
  • Youthpass
  • evaluation

10

16 Jul

Departure

Αναχώρηση

The groups travel home with a date already fixed for the workshop each will run there within three months. The main group stays open.

The toolkit is finalised and published as a free file within three months, and the poll responses collected in each country go into the same published comparison. Each participant’s contribution keeps changing the result after the week has ended.

What the day produces

Four scheduled workshops, one toolkit in progress, and nothing left behind that anybody has to pay for.

  • follow-up
  • publication
Scroll to move through the week
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Rest is visible in the timetable: a long break in the hottest hours, free evenings, a free block on the heaviest day, and no session that requires anyone to speak in front of the whole group.

Where

Rovies, northern Evia

A seaside campsite where sleeping, eating and every working space sit on one site, so that nobody travels during the working day. Almost all the work happens outdoors, under shade.

The paintingIvan Aivazovsky, The Ninth Wave, 1850 · Russian Museum
Survivors on a broken mast, and the sun comes up anyway. The week happens by the sea because the place makes the work easier, not because it is a holiday.

Heat and sun, handled as routine

The week falls in July and the site is built for it. Every working space is shaded, the long break falls in the hottest hours, sessions are weighted towards the morning and late afternoon, and water is part of the timetable rather than a reminder.

The sea, with rules

Nobody swims alone or after dark, and the sea is used only during agreed daylight hours with a group leader present. The site is enclosed with a staffed reception, and a vehicle is on site at all times.

Two venues in the villages

On the seventh day the two crews travel to two venues in the nearby villages: a youth centre or municipal summer programme, and a centre for older residents. Both venues and both audiences are secured two months in advance.

Why here and not in a city

A rural coastal community is exactly the kind of place these activities normally never reach. The public agora on the ninth day is set up in the village square, agreed with the municipality beforehand.

The materials have already been used once

The technique wall is built on cardboard and old newspaper. The masks are made from packaging and magazines. The public agora is assembled entirely from things the group has already made, with nothing bought for it.

This has a second effect that serves the project directly: a poster built on the back of a used sheet invites honesty in a way expensive paper does not, and it means everything participants learned can be repeated at home with whatever is lying around.

A week with few screens, on purpose

Phones are working tools: for the verification routine, for photographing the wall, for the data trail mapping. Beyond that the week is deliberately screen-light, and the venue helps.

A room full of screens would destroy the kind of conversation this project depends on, and a project about attention that spends its week on devices would be teaching the opposite of what it says.

Who

Four countries, seven people each

Every organisation sends exactly the same number of people: seven participants and one group leader. Country balance is built into the structure rather than managed afterwards, and no country has a larger voice in the room than any other.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563. An enormous unfinished tower of stacked arches rises beside a harbour, with hundreds of small figures working on every level.
The paintingPieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563 · Kunsthistorisches Museum
Babel is a story about what happens when people stop understanding one another. Four languages come into this project, and the first work is finding a shared one.

Sapere Aude Greece

Greece — applicant, host and coordinator

Works on democracy and human rights, gender equality, activism and ecology. Its members have completed Council of Europe training in human rights education and democratic activism, including work with the COMPASS manual.

Sapere Aude Serbia

Novi Sad, Serbia

Its members already work on media literacy, digital activism and human rights — almost exactly the subject of this project. Its contact person is a Fine Arts graduate working in digital art, cinema and animation.

The Focus Society

Sofia, Bulgaria

Built on the analogy of a camera lens: bringing attention and action to topics that are usually overlooked, at the meeting point of culture, art, civic participation and wellbeing.

EuroMeris APS

Calabria, Italy

Founded on active citizenship, political awareness and democratic participation, working through non-formal education. It brings a southern and largely rural context, where the distance between what young people are told is possible and what is actually available is part of daily life.

Who is selected, and how

Each organisation runs an open call locally, through schools, vocational colleges, universities, youth centres, libraries and whatever channels it actually has. The application asks why somebody wants to come, not what they have achieved. There is no CV, no essay and no academic vocabulary anywhere in it.

Previous Erasmus+ experience is stated as irrelevant to selection, and so is any background in media, journalism or politics. A basic working level of English is enough, and we say so plainly: fear of speaking badly is what keeps exactly the people we want from applying.

Shortlisted applicants have a short online interview with their own organisation. It confirms the application is their own work, and it is the moment when somebody can say what they would need in order to take part — usually more useful than any form.

Who is in the room

Twenty-eight participants aged 18 to 26, four group leaders and two facilitators from the host organisation. Leaders and facilitators are not counted as participants.

The age range is narrowed deliberately. The week asks people to design and facilitate a session for a room of adults, some of them fifty years older than they are, and to hold a public conversation with strangers in a square. The lower limit also means nobody is legally a minor while facilitating in a community venue.

Gender balance is monitored before anybody travels. Each organisation reports the composition of its selected group in a shared tracker, together with the age spread and the barriers its participants face. If a group is arriving heavily skewed, we ask that organisation to go back to its reserve list before travel is booked — the only point at which it can still be fixed.

Built so that everyone can come

The barriers we specifically recruit for are also the reason the topic exists. A manipulated information environment works hardest on people who already have reason to believe the system was not built for them.

  • EconomicTravel, accommodation, food and local transport are covered in full and there is no participation fee. Where somebody cannot pay for a ticket and wait for reimbursement, the ticket is bought directly — and that is written into the partnership agreements rather than left to goodwill.
  • GeographicalGroups travel together with their leader from the nearest transport hub rather than finding their own way across an unfamiliar country. Routes, timings and transfer points are prepared in advance with screenshots, and an extra travel day is planned in where it is needed.
  • SocialSelection asks for motivation, not credentials. The programme is built to be completed by somebody who does not write easily and does not enjoy speaking in front of a room. Analysis is done physically, by sorting and building, and the mixed teams of seven are made so nobody spends the week surrounded only by people who find all of this easy.
  • Education and trainingNo exercise requires anyone to speak in front of the whole group, and every role in the community sessions has a visual or practical version, so somebody can facilitate meaningfully by running an activity with their hands instead of by talking.

If a selected group arrives on paper with no participants facing any of these barriers, that is treated as a failed call rather than a completed one, and we go back to that organisation before travel is booked.

Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830. A woman carrying a flag strides forward over a barricade, followed by a crowd of ordinary people of different classes and ages.

Impact

34

The room

Twenty-eight participants, four group leaders, two facilitators. No outside speaker comes in to teach. An expert arriving to explain what disinformation is would turn the exchange into a lecture and undo the central point of the design, which is that the young people work it out themselves and then teach it.

≈50

Rovies, day seven

Around twenty-five local young people and twenty-five older residents take part in two workshops designed and facilitated by the participants. They are not observers: they do the exercises and answer the poll, and for many of the older group it is their first conversation about what they forward and why. On the ninth day the public agora in the square reaches passers-by as well.

200–300

Four countries, three months

Each participant runs or co-runs a local workshop within three months, in a place they already belong to: a school, a university, a library or a youth centre, reaching roughly twenty-five people. Every workshop includes a short part on what Erasmus+ Youth Exchanges are and how to apply, because most people find their way into this programme because somebody their own age told them it existed.

∞

What gets published

The toolkit, the session plans, the poll instrument and the results are published on the Erasmus+ Project Results Platform and on SALTO-YOUTH, under terms that allow free reuse, adaptation and translation. An organisation in a country that took no part in this project can run it in its own language without asking us.

The paintingEugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830 · Louvre

What remains

What exists in the world three months later

The toolkit

Four themes, each with a version for a room of teenagers and one for a room of older adults carrying the same learning point, plus the poll instrument so anyone can repeat the comparison locally. No training, no budget, no software — which is what decides whether a project result is ever used.

The comparison

Around one hundred responses from the host community and four countries: a small, honest piece of evidence about two generations, gathered by young people. It gives each participating country a base that did not exist before, and supports a funding application or a conversation with a municipality far better than a general claim.

The participants themselves

Each has stood in front of a room of people who are not their peers, most of them for the first time, and run part of a session on a topic they had to understand well enough to teach. They also leave with the habit of asking somebody older what they think, which almost none of them had before.

Youthpass: five competences, each tied to something specific

The competences are named on the first working day, so that participants know what to look for while it is happening rather than trying to reconstruct it on the last morning. The certificates name what each person actually did.

  • Literacy competenceTaking a real piece of media apart and stating what it does; three versions of the same true story for three audiences.
  • Multilingual competenceExplaining a technique found in your own language to six people who cannot read it, and facilitating in a second language in front of an unfamiliar audience.
  • Digital competenceThe two-minute verification routine, the personal data trail map, and changing one real setting or making one real request about your own data.
  • Personal, social and learning to learnEight days in a mixed international team of seven, and adapting the same content for a room of teenagers and a room of seventy year olds.
  • Citizenship competenceThe public agora, designing and running the poll, and above all facilitating a session for a generation you had generalised about until that afternoon.

Evaluation runs at four points, and each one can change something

Daily: thirty minutes of reflection in national groups with the group leader, which changes the next day’s pacing. Mid-term: a short form on the sixth day, with the second half of the week built so that it can be lightened. Final: an anonymous questionnaire mapped directly onto the six objectives. Three months later: a survey on the local workshop, how many came, and whether the verification routine is still in use.

Where something did not work, we say so plainly in the evaluation summary, and that summary goes into the published methodology. Anyone who reuses the method inherits our mistakes along with the structure.

At the end

Twenty-eight people who can name what is being done to them

And who have explained it, face to face, to two generations that are not their peers. The fog does not clear. You learn to recognise the shape of it.

The paintingCaspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, c. 1818 · Kunsthalle Hamburg