THE DREAMS
GINO GERMANI IN IDILIO MAGAZINE WITH PHOTOMONTAGES BY GRETE STERN
Collection: Numancia
Edited and Introduced by: Marina Mariasch and Syd Krochmalny
ISBN: 978-987-1622-57-3
Pages: 232
Year: 2017
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In Argentina’s cultural history, Gino Germani is widely recognized for his role as a key figure in the formation of scientific sociology and for his hypotheses on the meaning of Peronism. Yet, among all the facets that make up his canonical figure, very little attention has been paid to the curious “sentimental consulting room” he developed with the German photographer Grete Stern in Idilio magazine between 1948 and 1951.
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Idilio was a youthful, female-oriented, and popular publication that first appeared during the Peronist government. Amid photo-novels, articles advising women on household tasks, crosswords, and cosmetic advertisements, Germani and Stern created a section titled “Psychoanalysis Will Help You”—a confessional counterpoint that subtly revealed the psychic toll borne by readers subjected to the model promoted by the magazine. Women from working-class and middle-class backgrounds were invited to send in accounts of their dreams, which exhaled a dystopian air when examined through two procedures that were novel in Buenos Aires’ cultural context: the psychoanalytic interpretation offered by Germani’s texts, and the visual interpretation Stern produced through the technique of photomontage—a true language of protest propelled by Dadaist circles for its power to dismantle the conventions of vision.
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This volume brings together Germani’s interventions in Idilio, accompanied by a selection of Stern’s photomontages and facsimile reproductions of the magazine’s pages. In studies of Germani’s work, these texts are often ignored or dismissed as a playful anecdote, a frivolous detour in the sociologist’s career. Far from it: this catalog of female privacies devised by Germani constitutes a preliminary chapter in the incorporation of Freudian thought into popular culture, as well as a laboratory anticipating the strategies that would later shape conceptual art and media art.​
 
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Read a fragment (in Spanish) of The Dreams. Gino Germani in Idilio magazine with photomontages by Grete Stern, edited and introduced by Marina Mariasch and Syd Krochmalny.
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