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Propaganda did not end with the twentieth century. It changed channels. This was the central argument of Propagande 2.0, an exposition that traced the mechanics of persuasion from wartime posters to TikTok trends, using Harold Lasswell's communication model as both its theoretical spine and its physical architecture.
Lasswell's five questions, Who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect, became five stations. Each one asked visitors to do something rather than simply observe. At the first station, images of wartime governments, electoral campaigns, humanitarian organisations, and contemporary influencers were placed side by side, not to equate them morally but to show that the structure of their messages follows the same logic regardless of who is sending them. |
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At the second, eighteen slogans were laid out alongside eighteen emitters and visitors were asked to match them. Donald Trump and Orangina. Margaret Thatcher and the Hunger Games. Albert Camus and Marine Le Pen. The difficulty of the exercise was the point: the codes of simplification, emotional polarisation, and direct address are shared across contexts that we would otherwise never place in the same category.
At the third station, visitors assembled combinations of channels, messages, targets, and intended effects to show that propaganda is not an object but a strategy. At the fourth, stickers on a thematic panel mapped where visitors felt most susceptible to influence, ecology, travel, lifestyle, finance, illustrated by TikTok videos for each category. At the fifth, post-its collected individual responses to the question of what content had already pushed them to act. |
The whole exposition was built in Bauhaus primary colours, red, yellow, blue, with geometric forms throughout: rectangles, circles, triangles, sans-serif type.
The choice was not decorative. The students argued that the same visual logic that the Bauhaus pursued, clarity, simplicity, immediate impact, is precisely what makes propaganda effective. The form has always followed the function. The function has always been the same. What the post-its and stickers ultimately produced was a collective portrait. The accumulation of individual responses across stations four and five made visible something that each visitor could only partially see alone: the map of where a generation feels most reachable, most moveable, most likely to act. The exposition did not conclude by telling visitors what to think about propaganda. It handed them the evidence of their own responses and left them to draw the conclusion themselves. |
