The system of objects: Commodities

The project focuses on manufactured products that create and fill the space. Taking into account that we consider objects as the elements responsible for creating and completing the spatial environment that we will propose, it is very important to establish an understanding of the system of objects.

In this sense, objects, are not just manufactured products. They are acting as commodities inside the consumer society. For, our critique of the late capitalist society shifts dominance from production, to consumption, and to its media apparatus which fosters the commodification of both persons and objects, the core of our conceptual framework.

The objectification of material goods and persons, coming from the traditional definition of a commodity – a physical or intellectual substance which is interchangeable by means of an established equivalence (Marx, 1867) – has evolved into the current concept of the object of consumption (Baudrillard, 1981). In the consumer culture, the economic structure has reached the level of a superstructure, an ideology: “it is not simply the sanctification of the object but the sanctification of the system, commodity as system, the more the system is systematized the more the fetishist fascination is reinforced” (Baudrillard, 1981:92). This ideology of consumption determines the social status (collectivity) and self-definition (individuality) of the consumer. It's not just that accumulating objects confers membership of society, but also that “choices, organization and practice are a scaffolding for a global structure of the environment and active structure of behaviour” (Ibid:35).

So our aim will be to implement a decommodification that takes place in a context where use is priority to property, there is no market, nor are there any social discriminants; consequently these objects of consumption are stripped of their:

brand, or social status indicator,
price, not having a market value or an exchange (barter) value equivalent to a sum of money
proper function as a universal idealization of tools that fulfil an objective task, the functional simulacrum.

This subversion of the value system turns every object of consumption into a nude form made from various materials that allow the invisible woman to re-construct an alternative reality, wherein both she and the office environment are liberated from their status, price and proper function.