This project sets out from a reflection on consumerism in western culture and our everyday habits, the limits of public and private, and the invasion of the personal sphere by the media pressure to which we are constantly subjected.
The project involves a reproduction of the post-it notes we use every day as reminders. They are notes of our concerns, reminding us to do or refrain from doing certain things as we fix them in our memory, bringing a change of perspective in such everyday phrases. Notes which, magnified and displayed in public, would become advertisements of the everyday, thus acquiring other meanings.
The little concerns of daily life – going to the gym, dieting, smoking less, etc. – would in this new context reflect not our own wishes but the continuous seductive action of commercial advertising.
Incessantly subjected to advertisements, we are free, but free above all to choose between the various products on the market. Often we see how a car, an eau-de-cologne or the like will give us greater confidence, security or social success: they are symbols associated with social status and distinction. If a person on the street can today feel more secure in a good suit than with a good conscience it is because advertising has acquired the importance of an ideology. Our society and culture have absorbed the discourse of advertising, and it is not at all a neutral discourse. People’s needs and demands are (except the basic ones) created at any one time and correspond to the interests of the economy.
According to Pérez Tornero, “it is not going too far to speak of the construction of a model consumer. Advertising discourse, through successive waves of messages, all essentially redundant, helps to model a person concerned about novelty, who longs to possess the object offered and recycles his or her values and habits according to the latest offerings on the market.” For Tornero, advertising, through its strategies of identification with the consumer and projection, makes “each advertisement a kind of journey inside us.”
If this is true, the little private post-its we use to organize our day will essentially coincide with the adverts posted on the streets of our cities, and might even replace them.
Several façades: Círculo de Bellas Artes, Casa de América y Palacio de comunicaciones