Hugo Palmarola gana el Design History Society Student Essay Prize 2018

El premio fue establecido con el fin de mantener altos estándares en la escritura de la historia del diseño. El jurado evaluó originalidad, investigación, método y pensamiento crítico. El ensayo premiado se titula: “Technological Melodrama: The Role of Kitchen and Electrical Appliances in Mexican Cinema of the Golden Age”. Texto basado en la tesis que Hugo Palmarola desarrolla para su Doctorado en Estudios Latinoamericanos de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Resumen del ensayo premiado: “This article analyses the role of domestic technologies, namely stoves, vacuum cleaners and refrigerators, in the construction of imaginaries regarding the controversies between tradition and modernity in the Mexican cinema of the Golden Age. The selected films are studied from the point of view of Science, Technology and Society, as well as through a Structural Analysis of Contents within an Actantial Model. The combination of these approaches allows for an evaluation of the role of non-human actors (technologies) as helpers and/or opponents in a dramatic cinematographic narrative. This article demonstrates how the industry of Mexican cinema started to publicly and massively expose domestic technologies that were usually contained within a private and intimate space, helping to disseminate these innovations and render them familiar to the public. The films contributed to the construction of a powerful imaginary of behaviours that at the time were considered modern, that were destined to generate a new standard of habitability and comfort, and by which the benefits of innovations, especially the imported ones, were considered irrefutable facts. These films transcend the operative realm of artefacts and produce a significant relationship between the new technological values and the new social values of the time.”

Escenas de la película Una familia de tantas, director Alejandro Galindo, Ciudad de México, 1949.