CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The beginning of the 1930s marked a turning point in the world that brought a crisis of various dimensions: political, economic, social and cultural. In Argentina in particular, that decade was inaugurated with a coup d´État, where through electoral fraud the conservatives retained power. In turn, the agro-export economic model, key in Argentina since the end of the 19th century, began to reconfigure itself, first as a result of the First World War - by directing the manufacturing sector towards the domestic market - and then due to the economic crisis that began in 1929 A new economic stage took place thanks to the beginning of the Import Substitution Industrialization, which reduced the presence of imported products and promoted local manufacturing.It was in this context that Argentina accepted the challenge of sending a Pavilion to the Exposition internationale des arts et techniques appliquées à la vie moderne of 1937 that would take place in Paris. The proposal of this work consists in analyzing the shipment made from Argentina in the light of its recent changes: if in the universal exhibitions in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century Argentina had presented minerals, primary products and mannequins of ´gauchos´ on horseback, on this occasion there was a search to get away from that more picturesque image, once a characteristic of their national identity. For agro-exporting Argentina, participation in this exhibition was a great challenge since the guidelines for the exhibition did not include its most powerful industries: agriculture and livestock. However, its proposal was aimed at showing its products as a modern and renewed nation that could provide meat to the France in need of that moment and also show some proposals in the field of applied arts that were growing thanks to the recent inauguration of the National Museum of Decorative Art.