Screams in the landscape of our interior: advertising outdoors and the sensitive experience, in the daily routes: drifting through imaginary places
“As Balandier (1990) says, in everyday life individuals try to fight against the social dependency creating fee spaces of resistance. By imaginary, they can be more spontaneous and escape from their daily obligations. Precisely, we can discuss the role of advertising images outdoors in this process of individual creativity. Are they just a dimension of the public space for the affirmation of the dominant system and culture? Or, are they also a kind of open window to our completely free and intimate universe? And in doing so, by inviting individuals to (re)visit their intimate sphere (emotions, memories…), aren’t they a dissimulating way of occupying one’s inner landscape? If we agree with this last hypotheses (that’s our personal point of view) we must then discuss our contemporary conditions of the individuals daily existence in what concerns its freedom in public space and its right to freely negotiate his relation to landscape. As part of the landscape, advertising outdoors plays an important role in our relation with outside world. It contributes to a general aestheticization of the real. In advertising images, different conceptions of time and space are figured. Some subjects of the private life become visible throw publicity. Themes like sex, family, emotions, memories are signified in advertising as desirable imaginary places. It challenges us to accept the blurring of frontiers between intimate sphere and public sphere. As we can’t use public sphere to participate and discuss our common and political life, images became places of «intimacy», in Sennetts’s (1979) terms. Free from real social relations and rituals, we project ourselves in an imaginary universe. We enjoy the possibility of the «socialité» (Maffesoli), i.e., a kind of a passive attitude that turns us like “an object between other objects” or “a thing between other things”, in a fluid and transitive phenomenological process. It is a new aesthetic experience that brings us closer to the inanimate/inhuman. Advertising images invite us to accept the two time dimensions that characterize our everyday life experience: the linear and progressive notion of time, on one hand; and the circular and repetitive notion of time, on the other hand. In doing so, advertising images gave us the feeling of security, by evoking an archetypal and mythical relation with universe: it doesn’t matter what happens, because things will stay as the same. But also, images try to offer us the imaginary possibility of living in a non-conventional and intense way by breaking the tedious feeling of our daily routines”.
ANO
2007
AUTORES
Helena Pires | Orientador: Moisés de Lemos Martins
