Commodity Tableware

Critical Design

Commodity Tableware stems from an exploration of materiality guided by the relationship between human experience and the material world. The project dissects, deconstructs, distresses and rearranges household items with the aim of understanding their physicality and challenging their construction. In a bricolage manner, it brings together parts of different objects to make ready-made pieces that question their original function. In part, it focuses around the composition of day to day objects, following an entirely material-led process in which unconventional fabrication techniques were implemented towards challenging industrial manufacturing procedures, as well as notions of aesthetics, trash and consumption. It gives broken objects a second chance in a context that defies functionality to confront the viewer with an irregular view of the material world. 

Simultaneously, the project delves into Belk’s concept of the extended self to understand the intimate relationship that objects can arrive to have with their owners. Each of the final pieces tells a different story that can be analysed through the manipulation of the original items and their correlation with each other. All objects used have been previously owned, and thus reveal a certain intimacy that goes beyond their original users, and that puts itself up for interpretation so that it can exist in between the real experiences that the objects hold, and those that the viewer can identify with. It ironically commodifies private household experiences to offer a set of tableware that instead of giving into a typical neoliberal production of commodities, exposes a sort of waste that is essentially looked over as part of the human relation with objects. 

A text that reads “some things have been broken all along” accompanies the presentation of the pieces. It calls for a digestion of the realities being presented and invites the reader to have their own personal interpretation.