“The heyday of the ‘city of all’. “Mar del Plata in the sixties” It is the researchers’ book Melina Piglia and Elisa Pastoriza which will be presented this Sunday at 5pm at the Villa Victoria Ocampo Cultural Center (Matheu 1851).
In addition to the compilers, the teacher and researcher Daniel Reynoso will be at the launch. And in addition to the talk by the specialists, an exhibition of photos of the artists will be inaugurated “Pupeto” Mastropasqua and Dmitri Kessel.
Edited by Eudem, lAt the Editorial of the National University of Mar del Plata, the book develops various aspects that shaped the flowering of Mar del Plata as a mass tourist citybetween the ’60s and mid-’70s.
Themes appear developed such as tourism public policies, urbanization, the middle classes, leisure, construction and cultural representations. During the first half of the decade, the city presented favorable conditions for the development and consummation of that social experiment, the confluence in Mar del Plata of the entire social spectrum of Argentine society. Large beaches with absorption capacity, infrastructure, ideal road connections that allowed the use of automobile transport and municipal management attentive to citizen progress.
The city offered a intense sociability picture, pondered in countless photographs and stories and that memory has retained in memories full of emotions and feelings. These changes were visualized with certainty, confidence and the conviction in continuous progress and well-being, which was none other than that of Argentine society. Very soon, in the middle of the decade, symptoms appeared that showed the limits of these certainties: high tourist costs, economic crisis and authoritarianism. Also the desertion of some visitors -the young people and the elites- attracted by other options, would end up closing that peculiar moment of the “city of all”.
The photo sample invites you to explore that Mar del Plata from the perspective of two photographers with extensive careers who, with their cameras, managed to eternalize it: Juan Bautista Pablo “Pupeto” Mastropasqua (1934-2023) and Dmitri Kessel (for Life magazine 1902-1995 ).
