in italiano

Las Agencias
http://www.lasagencias.org

Las Agencias's projects, located in the troubled territory where art and activism meet, consist in the creation of tools, visual imagery and tactics. Las Agencias work as a flexible staff, open to the contribution of other groups and individuals: they turn some of the commercial, psychological and communication strategies used by business world and entertainement industry into public actions, revealing these strategies' cynical side through antithetis and paradox.

The New Kids On The Black Block campaign (2001), for example, is based on the creation of a pop music group with that name, showing the mediatic mechanism of construction of a star of the show system which is at once a political anti-hero. The result is a paradoxical - and very funny, by the way - short circuit between the star and the public enemy of the moment.

The last Las Agencias' campaign - presented for the first time in Italia at d-i-n-a.2002 - consists of a brand new clothing brand: Yomango (an hardly translatable expression that puts together the Spanish slang for "I shoplift" and "Mango", a trendy European clothing shops franchising). Mixing irony and exemplary actions, Yomango responds to the ruling economical phenomenon of global brands, that in Las Agencias' view are an advanced form of control over desire and public space. Yomango analyses the use of technology as a tool to fuel this up-to-date control system, revealing its secrets and weak points.