The Renault 4 in Colombia: Decoding the Cultural Landscape of a National Icon

Abstract

This paper aims to show the partial results of the research project "El Renault 4 in Colombia. Social biography of an object of Industrial Design", conceived as the thesis work of the master's program History and Theory of Art and the city of the National University of Colombia. This time the text focuses on the relationships that can be woven between cultural landscape, advertising narratives and symbol, taking as its axis the rescue of some representations that the automobile has enjoyed in the social life of Colombia. From this perspective, the approach that was taken to analyze the logics of involvement – of which it was dubbed the "Colombian car" despite its French origin – takes up its definitions as an object of consumption, cultural reference and creation rhetoric-advertising with "vital" trajectories within the everyday order imposed by the dynamics of modern consumer society; which in turn, is mainly connected with the theory of the construction of a "Social Landscape" by Joan Nogué composed of imaginaries and the perspective of popular culture and aesthetics coined by theorists such as Ticio Escobar. A qualitative methodology of historical and ethnographic approach was implemented. Netnography techniques, conversational techniques, documentary and archive search, visual anthropology and content analysis were implemented to access the sense substrates associated with the work corpus: Advertisements, stories and stories of life of collectors and users, press articles of the decades in mention and photographic records of the automobile.