Our EU-funded French-German project week, „Whose streets? Our streets! Questioning advertising in public spaces,“ has finally begun! All participants are gathered at the conference center. We’re playing icebreaker games, our partner organization, Résistance à l’Agression Publicitaire (RAP), has prepared a presentation on advertising, and in the afternoon we’re heading downtown to the Berlin Global exhibition. One participant shares her experience:
Participants report Day 1:
We begin the day with a wonderful shared breakfast, giving everyone the opportunity to get to know each other. We also explore the surroundings of the venue, ideally located near Lake Wannsee, bathed in sunshine today. Once we are all gathered, we briefly present the day’s programme and the house rules.
Awareness-topics
After the meal, we gather in the meeting room and begin with a few icebreaker activities: we learn each other’s name, and we play a positioning game, where we position ourselves in the room to represent our opinions about various subjects. The first polls test our feeling concerning various awareness-related topics, and the following ones focus on our familiarity with the advertising and its history. Finally, we take some time together to establish the important awareness rules of the week.
Kick-off about advertising
The second half of the morning is dedicated to a presentation of the two collectives organizing the week (Vereinigung Vernetzung Partizipation (VVP) and Resistance à l’Agression Publicitaire), and by a thematic kick-off on the subject „How does advertising affect us and society?“.
Berlin advertising more aggressive than in Paris?
After lunch, we all take the S-Bahn together to Berlin (the one-hour journey gives us time to connect) and we have our first contact with the city (and the advertising inside it!)I find it much more aggressive than in France, with a noticeable presence of digital screens of various sizes.
Berlin Global in Humboldt Forum
We then spend the afternoon at the Humboldt Forum visiting the exhibition „Berlin Global“, which offers an alternative approach to the city of Berlin. Instead of proceeding as a traditional historic exhibition, Berlin Global allows us to meet the city through transversal and interactive perspectives, exploring its influence on the world, and how the city was influenced by it. The exhibition approaches the rich and complex history of Berlin during the last century through the lives of its inhabitants, from the emergence of the European queer culture under the Weimar Republic to the underground Punk scenes in the former east Germany, allowing us to feel, touch (and even taste !) the aspects of Berlin that shaped it, and the world around it.
Advertising of messages?
While advertising is not directly a subject of this exhibition, many connections can be made with it: examples of street art reflect how the walls and streets of Berlin can be used to transmit political and artistic content, in short, messages that can bring us together (whereas advertising atomises us as mere consumers). The exhibition closes by presenting the challenges that such a city faces: how to gather people, how to make people’s lives more democratic, how to fight against sexism and discrimination, how to allow diversity in such a place. As we will see on Sunday, advertising is usually an obstacle to these goals.
Discovering cultural and food spots
After the exhibition, as part of team goes back to the hostel, some of us stay in the city, wandering around and discovering cultural and food spots, with helpful tips from the Berliners in the group
More information:
Youth participation project „Whose streets? Our streets?“:
https://vernetzungpartizipation.noblogs.org/post/category/whose-streets-our-streets/
Our performance day in public space:
https://vernetzungpartizipation.noblogs.org/post/2026/04/01/franco-german-networking-meeting-on-advertising-culminates-in-public-space-interventions/
More participants reports:
https://vernetzungpartizipation.noblogs.org/post/2026/04/03/whose-streets-our-streets-projektwoche-in-berlin/
The event is funded by the European Union as a youth participation project under the Erasmus+ program.
This project is funded by the European Union. The content reflects solely the opinions of the authors. The EU Commission and Youth for Europe are not liable for any consequences arising from its reuse