The abandoned
Santiago de Chile, 2016
Can the immense vegetation of objects be classified as a flora or a fauna, with its tropical and polar species, its sudden mutations, its species that are about to disappear?
Even when the product is in perfect condition, we are tempted to change it. Due to the different forces of power that manipulate consumers, especially through the image. However, this satisfaction of renewing the "old" product lasts less and less, since the market offers us a constant renewal of wishes. Thus, what we finally pay when buying a product is the feeling, how we feel about that particular item. Faced with the above problem, it is necessary to react both for one's own good and for society as a whole, without forgetting the life of the planet that succumbs to this productive and commercial machine that does not care about the negative impact it causes on the environment. Our unbridled consumption habits advance at such an accelerated pace that there is no time for reflection that leads us to question the limits of the supposed growth that development gives us. We do what advertising orders, without prior meditation. Consumption has been installed as the meaning of life, the main motivation of an existential project, and as a consequence of this, the idea and experience of happiness is increasingly poorer. This phenomenon increases social inequalities, diseases and also undermines social relations, which ultimately translates into the devaluation of the human being turned into merchandise. Today consumption is not a meaningless and irrational act, we understand it as an event loaded with meaning, it is a process of social communication that establishes realities and identities, which are transformed in turn into consumption.
"We communicate through the objects we acquire based on the ideas they project. We men exchange objects to satisfy needs that we have culturally fixed, to integrate with others and to distinguish ourselves from them, to fulfill desires and to think about our situation in the world, to control the erratic flow of desires and give them constancy or security in institutions and rites" (García Canclini, 1995).