National Network for the Protection of Children and Adolescents´ Rights.
Image. 2001. Argentina.
The central image of the flag as a swing, which supports or protects a child, casts the national society into the role which is occupied graphically by the flag. In this sense, it engages it in creating the joy and support that the swing offers and that the child deserves.
The design is based on the idea that the flag, as a representation of Argentina, and the child are one thing together and that the result of that integration is something quite positive, such as a child feeling supported and happy.
Thus, graphically, the flag, that is to say, what is institutional, is the axis of the work and the rest of the sources must then define the situation of the flag, humanizing it and regulating the tension of the whole, according to the general expectation of the message.
The face of the child was the hardest part for me to do, because initially I did not want to show the features of the face since this contributed to defining a specific gender, something unimportant in this case. At the same time, to not complete the face also highlighted the presence of the Argentinean flag, since there was less information (the face of the child) in the image.
However, the back light, the feeling that the light was behind the image, gave it a mysterious and sinister quality that I did not want to present. For this reason, by defining the features I could reduce the sensation of strangeness which would emerge when encountering a person whose face one cannot see and which, to make matters worse, is blue.
In this sense, the texture of watercolour and the pureness of the rest of the colours are able to gather within a warm atmosphere the institutional quality, the coldness of the light blue and the straight and plain stripes of the flag.
© Sebastian Guerrini, 2009
