The European Union

The audience had already made up its mind, and that conditioned response was the real constraint. So the art direction abandoned polish as a value: photographs sellotaped to surfaces, handwritten annotation, graffiti lettering, rough composition. Not disorder for its own sake, but fluency in the visual language of the people being addressed. It was a risk on an institutional account, and it was the only route that stood a chance of being looked at rather than looked past.

The content was four real consequences of EU involvement that the institution's own communications had made invisible: an Argentinian video producer who relocated to Spain on EU-built digital infrastructure, a Malaysian student on Erasmus in Berlin, a doctor whose community received EU support during the COVID response in Dakar, a Guatemalan coffee farmer sustained by agricultural partnerships. The documentary direction followed the same rough grammar as the print — handheld, unfiltered, street-level. Every poster and film carried a QR code into a metaverse environment structured around the campaign's four pillars, each with its own 3D exhibition space. That was the funnel: street to screen to participation.