Commodity Tableware (For Digesting Late Capitalism) stems from an exploration of materiality guided by the relationship between human experience and the material world. The project desconstructs, distresses and rearranges household items to understand their physicality and challenge their construction. In a bricolage manner, it brings together parts of different objects to make ready-made pieces that question their original functionality. In part, it focuses on the composition of day-to-day objects, following an entirely material-led process in which unconventional fabrication techniques are 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 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 develop with their owners. Each of the final pieces tells a different story that can be analysed through the function of the original items, their manipulation 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. 

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 interpretation.