Screen of my Desires. How advertising changed the life of the Italian people 1954-2004

07 july 2004 - 12 september 2004

A Castello di Rivoli Museum of Comunication exhibition

Part of the Rai 50^th anniversary celebrations.

In association with the Direzione RAI Teche.

Curated by Ugo Volli – Historical consultant Marta Boneschi

July 7 – 12 September, 2004

Fifty years have gone by since the first television programmes were broadcast in Italy. The economic, political and cultural impact that such a widespread and universally popular means of communication has had on our society cannot be exaggerated. The aim of this exhibition is to highlight the extraordinary impact that television has had on Italian people’s daily lives. Above all, over this period, television has been the main vehicle for advertising, and therefore the place where new consumer goods are displayed and promoted.

For anyone who has not directly experienced these changes, it would be difficult to understand just how much life has altered since the 1950s as a result of the huge growth of mass consumerism.

There is no aspect of our lives that has not been completely revolutionised over the past fifty years, from transport, with the development of the automobile, to food, with the proliferation of the refrigerator, ready-meals and manufactured drinks; from the cleanliness of the body and the home to the way of dressing; from leisure to childcare; from personal hygiene to music, books, the performing arts. All of these changes have been promoted, expounded, propitiated and popularised by advertising, primarily television advertising. The history of advertising is bound up with the history of everyday life and with that of the means of satisfying society’s needs and desires.

This exhibition is a kind of journey backwards through time. We start with the present, with the information and advertising overload that is the hallmark of our communications world; from there we move backwards, year by year, to the time when there was no television and advertising was rare and had little influence.

Although the year 1954, the ultimate goal of our journey, was not the beginning of the development of consumerism and advertising in Italy, it marked a pivotal point: this was the period when the language of communication and consumerism started to gain currency in Italy, soon assuming the appearance and the influence it has today.

Our journey backwards is accompanied by a time line of fifty televisions, each showing the keynote advertisements of a particular year. Beside each television set is a sample collection of consumer goods – all products that entered public awareness in that year. Some of these are sophisticated objects of design and are the result of refined projects; most are much simpler, however, they are mass-produced products which became extremely popular, thus typifying the life of those times. Together they give us a picture of a certain way of life, of a “material culture” as the anthropologists term it: as we move backwards they grow simpler and plainer, less technological and less “consumerist”.

Our journey backwards in time could be viewed as a kind of “strip-tease” of the consumer society; we have divided the period into five sections, plus a prologue and an epilogue. Each period is identified in the exhibition by a doorway based on the logo of the Museum of Communication; in each area a multimedia display shows some of the main features of the period.

Ugo Volli