PoGo-Poetry on the Go
Strategic Partnership in the Youth Sector, supported by the EU under the program Erasmus+.
Lead partner:
The project is implemented by City Arts Nottingham (United Kingdom) in cooperation with:
InterCollege ApS
Asociata de Dezvoltare a Europei Prin Tineri – ADEPT (Romania)
Kocaeli İl Milli Eğitim Müdürlüğü – KPDoNE (Turkey)
InterBildung e.V. (Germany)
SEMPER AVANTI (Poland)
Background
Division amongst Europeans is one of the ever-persisting issues, which the EU has been trying to address through a variety of programmes and policies. A Eurobarometer report from 2017 shows that 54% of the respondents on EU level believe that there is no common European culture as European countries are too different from one another.
When young people were asked “How do we build a stronger, more united Europe?”, learning foreign languages and learning about cultures were amongst the most frequent answers (Eurobarometer 2019).
From amongst all forms of cultural expression, the consortium chose to work with poetry in order to foster European identity amongst young people.
Aims and Objectives
The project aims to foster European identity by strengthening amongst young people a feeling of belonging to a shared European culture. To achieve their aim, the partners took the approach of enhancing the presence of poetry in young people’s environment by the use of modern technology.
The project objectives are:
1. By August 2021, to give 487 young people from the participating countries the opportunity to define European culture and contribute to its enrichment;
2. By December 2021, to develop a mobile application that gives young people access to European culture as defined by their fellows;
3. To foster, by the end of the project, a private-public partnership with at least 60 stakeholders in the partner countries that contributes at promoting a shared European culture.
Outputs
The project will produce a mobile app, named “PoGo”, that will bring European poetry in young people’s environment, in a format that is attractive and engaging to them. The app will have a library of 78 poems from the UK, Romania, Denmark, Poland, Turkey, and Germany under four categories:
• Classic or Forgotten Poetry
• Contemporary Poetry
• Poetry by Young People
• Collaborative Poetry
The poems will be available in video format as young people will be video recorded reciting their selected poems in the original language. A translation of the poems will be provided ensuring that the meaning of the poem is conveyed to a large audience.
The app will use Augmented Reality (AR) technology. By scanning an AR-code containing the title of a poem in the app’s library, the app will:
a) with the help of the telephone photo camera, show on the telephone screen the specific environment/location (the library room, the pub etc) where the phone’s possessor is;
b) launch the video file of the respective poem with overlaid sensory information to the real-world location
