Priscila Lena Farias / Anna Calvera Marcos da Costa ... - Blucher

Graphic narratives of the domestic landscape
Figure 1. Telephone directory back page, Medellín
city. 1973-1974. (photo by Augusto Solórzano)
private sphere is distorted into its privacy because of the new
interaction forms proposed by technology (Echavarría 1995).
On the other hand, the notion of domestic landscape can also be
inferred from the sociological and historical fields in the works of
Baudrillard (1971 and 2010) and De Vries (2009). Here the notion
of consumption serves as a category of analysis for both authors
to unveil from different perspectives on how the nuances
of the production of objects of contemporary society shape the
domestic landscape. The route that traces Baudrillard in El Sistema
de los Objetos (2010) and on La Moral de los Objetos (1971)
glimpse a dramatic change in material culture and the impoverishment
of the aesthetic experience derived from industrialization
but mostly a change in which basic needs are subordinated
to comfort, luxury and leisure. This depletion is related to the
fact that the industrial objects no longer produce in the being the
same degrees of involvement of yesteryear. The reason for this is
that when changing the primary needs of the object, what really
changes is the very history that man establishes with the object
and therefore its involvement modes and sensitivity that affect
the way we understand, build and inhabit the home landscape.
Intending to find more details of this change, De Vries proposes
that beyond the paradigms of conspicuous consumption, luxury
and comfort that determined the course of production of modern
societies, there is a reallocation of roles in the home from
which can be inferred the construction of a new domestic landscape
proposed from new consumption targets and developing
strategies to achieve them. To explain this phenomenon De Vries
proposes the concept of industrious revolution that rather than
a revolution can be understood as an evolution of consumption
that occurs when the peasants work is intensified, sales are increased
and marketing of goods before the integration of markets
and markedly increases the consumption of goods. Each
of these factors eventually led households to gradually redirect
their resources and landscape of the home was built from consumer
desire.
Figure 2. Telephone directory back page, Medellín
city. 1976-1977. (photo by Augusto Solórzano)
2. Case of study
Figure 3. Telephone directory back page, Medellín
city. 1980-1981. (photo by Augusto Solórzano)
As a case study in which we can identify visible features of the
home landscape of the back pages of the telephone directories of
Medellin city would be analyzed. These graphic elements are renewed
year after year and are a kind of showcase that advertises
household appliances for the past 50 years. Although, it should
be noted that in Colombia that renewal varies according to the
city to which the phone belongs, Medellin’s case is paradigmatic
because since 1956, when Public Enterprises of Medellín emit
their first telephone directory , the appliance company Haceb
colonizes this advertising space and since then it becomes an
integral part of this data book. In this sense, reading together of
the back pages of the directories becomes a historical document
from which it is possible to identify forms of organization and experimentation
of home territory that record relationships of age,
gender, class, ethnicity, power among others (Figures 1, 2 and
3). The description and analysis of the landscape of the home
through the back pages, is interested in the ephemeral way in
which the house objects are renewed, while seeking to make visible
the way in which through the advertising speech constructs
a notion of home, but also that this notion is the reference for
building the advertising account.
This story-territory relationship raises the question of how distant
is the imagined the vivid landscape. Similarly this relationship
questions about the elements and values that go unnoticed
for those that are involved in thinking and arranging home advertising.
While it is clear that the social content of graphic design
embraces a vast territory whose minutiae is impossible to
portray in detail, it should be noted that through his territories
can be identified camouflaged by invisibility. From the infinite
advertising system to the impersonally printed propaganda that
impersonally is spread on the street, they both constitute a horizon
of meaning that has a clear ideological function that can
be identified and that realizes symbolic territories of everyday
cartographies of hidden landscapes in which intertwines the vis-
Design Frontiers: Territiories, Concepts, Technologies 230