Visual Culture and consumption in Chile. Analyzing advertising in shopping "mall" in the eighties

Abstract

This article presents the results of an investigation where there main objective was to explore the relationship in between visual culture and consumption in Chile, the case study analyzed as a reference is that of the Parque Arauco mall in the eighties. We propuse that the sociocultural role acquired by Parque Arauco shopping mall in Chilean society would be a consequence of a particular visual storytelling that, together with granting an aesthetic value to the experience of buying it links consumption with everyday experiences associated with a new lifestyle, aspirations and expectations of a modernization process imposed by an authoritarian context. The research considered a fieldwork that analyses from a qualitative perspective the advertisements published between 1982 and 1990. A corpus of 6 works were selected. Among the main findings the outputs highlights a symbolic dimension of consumption beyond a functional one, associated with a new way of understanding spaces of social interaction and representation of everyday life. In this sense, the visual discourse of Parque Arauco, anticipates the profound cultural and behavioural transformation that Chilean society will experience in the nineties, by moving the expectations of change from a political sphere to consumption, as an articulating axis of identities and social recognition.