Land. An exhibition on Uruguayan posters

Sebastian Alonso / Martin Craciun (Alonso+craciun). Afiches: Santiago Velazco y Javier Cirioni. Montevideo is recognized as a city where posters, billboards and paintings in public places are key players of the burg’s visual repertoire. Those expressions –formerly conceived with mere political motifs– turned into a heterogeneous visual matrix since the breathtaking 1990s in which cultural promotion, trade union vindications, consumers’ products and the traditional soccer matches rub elbows with one another. The privatization and professional character of poster and billboard hanging, as well as the “street codes”, make up a new order in our visual scenario. The outskirt condition of certain downtown areas and centrality itself provide a dynamic circulation, viewing and reposition of the graphic material. It’s right within that conflictive and democratic framework where LAND colonizes square yards of urban landscape, the one who actually win the match: “I want to do my own stuff and I want to show the people how the city can be used.” LAND’s visual outcome, from the designing process, takes shape in reference to cultural products that make the rounds, manipulating recognizable forms, using and mixing heterogeneous values in a bid to generate a new meaningfulness. The exhibition and permanence of its works in the public highway triggers and reformulates the checkerboard concept constituted in only one stage that winds up working on the basis of error, rupture, wearing and accumulation, of the relationships between new and complex social layers. A reference to the contemporary production and postproduction ways is determined by a obsessive job derived from design studies and in which digital processes provided by different software are the name of the game. LAND complements and renders lab trials hailing from the global street art (signs, marks, forms), from the painting, the stencil, the graffiti and photographic images, toward local resonances. These contacts with the local in our field come from the contemporary music scene. Is it the only contact point? LAND’s layout seems to come right on time for building a new urban viewing in relation to boldface names from the regional showbiz. The massive product allows for formal experimentations, subjective games by the author, the making of identifying images and quasi-immediate feedback on the part of the public. August 14, 2009 LAND is a graphic design studio currently composed by Santiago Velazco and Gabriel Pica located in the city of Montevideo, Uruguay. It basically works for the publishing and corporate image fields, music and the visual arts.