Artigo:

"The abstract summarizes the progress of the ongoing master's research entitled “FIGURES AND SCENIC BACKGROUNDS OF FICTIONED NATURES AND MACHINES IN THE GRAPHIC VISUALITY OF THE SOUTH. Tourist posters of the Uruguayan coast 1935-1960.” The central idea of the work is how, through posters (along with other graphic artifacts), the Uruguayan coast is promoted as a nascent setting for leisure and tourism, contributing to a new modern imaginary. Uruguay is a small country between two giants, with a broad front on the Río de la Plata and the Atlantic Ocean. Its development reflects Western sensibilities (Corbin, 1993) and the growing expansion of tourism since the 1930s. This is inseparable from the so-called Neo-Batllista State, with its large presence, which understood tourism as an “industry without smokestacks”. Recognizing tourism as an “industry without smokestacks,” the government established the National Tourism Commission (CNdT) in 1933 to implement national tourism policies through public-private partnerships. The CNdT has a National Tourism Office (ONdT), which contains first the Advertising Department and then the Publicity Section, who designs annual advertising plans and designs various graphic artifacts such as posters, periodicals, brochures, guides and maps. The approach to the meaning of these graphics is supported by Iñaki Ábalos’s theory of landscape, which helps to recognize picturesque scenes that recreate the genius loci (Ábalos, 2005); and in the categories of “discrete landscape”, typical of the Uruguayan coast (in contrast to the notion of “categorical landscape”) (Capandeguy, 2015). The CNdT produces a multitude of graphic artifacts that are currently not preserved in a single national archive. For this reason, especially in this last semester, work has been carried out on (re)composing a “twin” documentary collection, based on the assembly of raids in institutional archives and scattered material found by the author. This includes isolated pieces and personal collections of Uruguayan designers, never before seen as a collection or single sample, and until now little studied or unknown in Uruguayan historiography. In this sense, the corpus of this research is based on a set of 50 unpublished sketches and original tourist posters produced by the CNdT between 1935 and 1960. Secondary sources such as minutes, letters, advertising plans, newspaper articles from the time, magazines, brochures and photographs (promotional and exhibition), and interviews with family members of the designers who provided original elements were also investigated. Such materials allow us to address the iconosphere of posters, a topic that has also been not studied in Uruguay. (Meneses, 2003) This included its use in exhibitions and shop windows of the ONdT information agencies in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. These function as a scenic background for the posters, illuminated and located in urban nodes, to attract visitors or pedestrians considered potential tourists. Poupart is being used as methodological support (for interviews); Graphic analysis is part of the studies of graphic memory (Braga, Farias, 2018); The semantic perspective of typography is analyzed according to Farias, Silva, 2005, and the image analysis is supported by Goldsmith, 1984. Finally, the intensive archival work that is currently being completed brings new discoveries; affirms the importance of the CNdT as an institution for tourism promotion; and provides elements to demonstrate the hypothesis that the scenes represented abstract, enclose and fictionalize the “discrete landscapes” of the Uruguayan coast, which seem to “intensify”. All this contributes to a new local and modern visual culture in Uruguay."