Wednesday 24 October 2012

MP/VISUAL RESEARCH - TUTORIAL



Silke Lange gave me a tutorial with quite a few references to pick up.  Missing Star is one of them.  It is a movie.  It is about Labourer Vincenzo travels from Italy to China in search of a machine with a deficiency that was produced in the now defunct establishment at which Vincenzo worked for years. I saw the trailer, most of which set in a small China town with not that kind of modern urbanscape like big cities in China.  Seems interesting, will check it out.  She also mentioned what is behind Made in Germany.  It was actually initiated by English during the war discouraging people from buying German products, but as time goes by it becomes a symbol for quality.  So I looked it up and found:

The label was originally introduced in Britain by the Merchandise Marks Act 1887, to mark foreign produce more obviously, as British society considered foreign produce to be inferior to domestic produce, and tried to get buyers to adhere to the concept of 'buying British.'

In 1894, the German Reichstag's commission already reported that after suffering slight losses, German manufacturers soon found the label to be of good use since they could distinguish themselves better from the British manufacturers. This led to more and more manufacturers voluntarily applying the label, and not even World War I, in which marks were mandatory in Britain in order to boycott products from countries of the Central Powers, could dent the growing popularity of the mark.

The term Made in Germany was soon associated with product reliability, quality and even perfection.
My portraiture project’s working title is Made in China, probably today, it stands for inferior quality and mass production.  It is an idea to dig out the background and context behind “Made in China”.  

Silke also asked me to check out Layla Curtis.

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