 Todo por la praxis | [CHEMA: EL MUNDO ES AZUL] | 32319 kB |
| Todo por la praxis | [CHEMA] | 249 kB |
EL MUNDO ES AZUL, 2004 (the word is blue)
Plaza de España, Madrid
Chema
In 2003, Telefónica launched a promotional campaign using motorbike racers which were sponsored by the company. That same year, some of them were world champions, so the company took advantage of the media hype to promote their company. The main slogan, the campaign’s message (“The world is blue”) uses the accidental media effect in an ambiguous manner, transferring it to a company’s reality whose only connection to such event is its sponsor condition. That is, once more, publicity and marketing use classic tools, such as de-contextualization, appropriation, opportunism, to launch their campaigns. And it’s here where as a reaction and counter-campaign arises using the same codes, the same tools, but subverting them. “The world is blue” campaign reminded me of the true blue world, that is, to bricklayers. To substitute some media icons, whose clothing consists of blue overalls, which are also worn by unknown bricklayers, maintaining the rest, thus creating a perfect scenery.
Promotional posters used for Telefónica’s “the world is blue” campaign.
T The world is blue
D The new design of telephone booths provides a space that the company itself uses to promote their services. The posters’ design has been conditioned by the size and the format of promotional space available in telephone booths. As it was impossible to introduce the posters in that space in a conventional way, the posters are made of vinyl that is stuck on the available space, the action took place by sticking two pieces of vinyl (100x80) in two booths, the interventions posters intertwine with the real Teléfonica posters. The posters remained unnoticed for about a month, once the company renewed their promotional posters.
A 2004
P Plaza de España Madrid
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TODO POR LA PRAXIS (TPP) was created as a “laboratory for Projects” which produces a variety of aesthetic and cultural projects. TPP is formalized in an area of design and testing of the most efficient cultural resistance techniques, focusing on testing non conventional tools, forms of organization and action, around specific action projects. Their two basic themes are activist artistic practices or opposition practices as a means to represent social conflict in an effective aesthetic manner and artistic practices in/on public space and its repercussions on the social context in which they inscribe themselves. Those basic themes are themselves divided in three research lines that are represented through their alter egos: establishing a symbolic game which defines each of their working areas.
CHEMA: Alter ego of “Todo por la Praxis” Project. Chema is built through the symbiosis of two main icons of revolutionary movements: Che Guevara, paradigm of the revolutionary movement, precursor of guerrilla war tactics and Mao Tse-Tung, forerunner of the social mobilization campaign defined as cultural revolution. Chema is created as a new revolutionary icon, by mixing characteristics of the two and developing a new line of direct action through the new concept of “cultural guerrilla”.
One of the most urgent functions of confrontational cultural practices is to redirect propaganda campaigns, through interferences in the communicative channel, specific social issues, refocusing campaigns from a position that shows the internal contradictions of the symbolic system of ideological transmission.
Therefore, an anti-hegemonic social praxis that works by decoding, dismantling codes, mechanisms, artefacts and ideological and coercive constructions with which the ruling class maintain their discursive hegemony.
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