By Gabriella and Ximena
We hope you’ve kept safe and healthy in these unusual times. We’d like to thank all of you who contacted us for diverse projects, and also —thinking about the longer hours we spend at home—, we’d like to start recommending some good books and/or films from Latin American and Spanish writers and directors, that are not always well known around the world. We start with The Englishman of the bones, a great example of the “Gaucho” literature from Argentina, that was published by Benito Lynch in 1924. It´s a delightful novel that showcases the relationship by the Argentinians living in lost villages and the British who went there, loosely based upon the travels of Darwin in Patagonia. (If you can´t read Spanish, at least you can watch the movie from 1940, directed by Carlos Hugo Christiensen).
Hope the last term of the year is better than it has been so far!
Greetings from Barcelona and Buenos Aires,
Gabriela and Ximena
In spite of the strange conditions, we’ve kept ourselves quite busy. In the last months, we’ve worked with several projects that are really meaningful in the pandemic, such as handwashing habits and new perceptions in Brazil and Spain, and wellbeing in Peru. We have also been working on NGOs projects, with the objective of understanding the impact of the pandemic in Latin American lower classes, and their future perspectives. Our findings confirm how important it is —both for public policy design and for product/brand innovation— to always keep in mind that Latin America is the region with the highest rates of structural social inequality in the world. Brands and projects who clearly see the world has changed are already trying to understand the worlds people live in.
Gabriela had the great opportunity of travelling to Paris with a group of students from IED Barcelona, to analyze the codes of Luxury Fashion and beyond, exploring the references and context of creators such as Cristóbal Balenciaga, Azzedine Alaïa and Christian Louboutin. They also visited a great exhibition about Harper’s Bazaar, that immersed the students in the fundamental meaning that fashion magazines had in culture until the 1990s. (Bonus track: Semiotic thinking in action in this funny video about the “Granny Room” presented at Louboutin’s exhibition.)
Meanwhile, on the other side of the ocean, Ximena has joined the team of the AAS —Asociación Argentina de Semiótica (Argentina Semiotics Association)—, to work on spreading our discipline and building networks, considering that Argentinian semiotics has always been a beacon in the area of Spanish speaking semiotics.
At SemioticaStudio, we help brands and projects to deeply understand the worlds in which their consumers live. We research from a semiotic and cultural analysis perspective for diverse types of projects. We also offer workshops and tailor-made training, and help companies and brands in developing sustainability projects and its narratives, also for the design of e-commerce and retail spaces.
Images from the Paris exhibitions.
To learn more about the SemioticaStudio:
semioticastudio.com
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