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centre in situations of extreme need. It celebrates as such a positive perspective. One can also contemplate the repertoire of refrains that we have presented in a similar way. The conservative slant doesn’t deny its condition as moral literature. It fulfilled a comprehensible mission in circumstances of neglect. It now has an historic and aesthetic value. Memory and meaning
The interest in the repertoires of communication is multiple. On the one hand, there is the warning call about the fugacity or loss of documents, be they propaganda leaflets, official announcements or mural inscriptions. In many cases it is ephemera. That is why we think that it is worth conserving and grouping them into repertoires. Later it will be necessary to give them meaning with an internal and comparative study. The great value of these repertoires is in providing a historical perspective that enables us to escape the tyranny of the present and to jog our memory about stereotypes and models of social communication. The repertoires of communication are a source of political and journalistic oratory in the 20th Century. But they are also symbolic scenarios for public action, for the collective identity, political legitimisation and institutional propaganda. The catalogue of proverbs at the Casa de Caridad of Barcelona is a brief and clear display of this idea of communication as the sum of memory and meaning. When we ask about our condition as communicators – “are we all communicators?” – we can think, in the first instance, in the creation of the artist or in the rhetoric of the orator. But not just in this. A light is also cast on a more complex perspective, one that combines ambits of discourse, political institutions, protocol, ideology, popular tradition and the historic perspective.
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