In the Realm of Advertising

03 november 2003 - 29 february 2004

Curated by Ugo Volli

Castello di Rivoli is opening a section devoted to advertising. It will be Italy’s very first advertising museum, as its objective is to collect, classify and conserve posters, film commercials and other advertising material, and make them available to the public for reference purposes. The museum will also stage themed exhibitions to highlight different aspects of advertising, its protagonists and key developments in advertising discourse.

Nel paese della pubblicità (In the Realm of Advertising) is the first of these exhibitions

It focuses on the imaginary spaces advertisers use as background to the products and brands featured in ads and in TV commercials. Together they make up an entire world, embracing rural and urban landscapes, private homes and public places, real, everyday environments and the imaginary spaces of science fiction and the Wild West. Moreover, this world does not simply reflect our reality; it is more a projection, a manufactured image, the backdrop to the collective dream offered by the advertising industry. In fulfilling the intention of the exhibition, which is to identify these spaces and represent them physically in a display setting, we are led to question their meaning and content.

The exhibition consists of sixteen of the archetypal spaces that appear most frequently in advertising narratives. At each of these locations there will be screenings of a series of commercials shot there: The Sea, represented in advertising as the place where aspirations and dramatic values are staged; New York, the ultimate urban myth; The Wild West, the place where advertising continues to draw the myths of cowboys and frontier life; On the Road, a space filled with suspense, uncertainty and adventure; The filling station; The Countryside, depicted in advertising as “another place”, meaning “nature” – an aesthetically pleasing backdrop to a weekend in the country; Mountains, seen as dangerous places that test to the limit the resources; the domestic nature of The Garden; The Kitchen, no longer staged as the place where we keep the equipment and raw materials for food preparation, it has now become a space where we relate to each other; The Bedroom, the place for love and sleep; The Bathroom, an intimate space for nudity and an altar to mass narcissism; The Table, traditionally associated with the sense of taste and also meant as a social institution; The School, and its classrooms filled with rows of desks; The Bar, a predominantly masculine environment; Sport: scenery of a modern-day religion; The Theatre, the original medium of mass communication and touchstone of the performing arts, it is chiefly used by advertisers for its capacity to present products in a scenario that grabs the audience’s complete attention.

This brings about a temporary rearrangement in the way advertising is produced, unlike the “natural” method of organising by products or brands (or by its authors, agency or chronological development). It enables us to take a step back from the purely functional aspect of advertising discourse and concentrate both on its implicit content and on the images that spring from the world of our imagination.

Ugo Volli