FUTURA TABLEWARE: MODERN MATTER AND HOUSEHOLD CONSUMPTION IN CHILE

Abstract

The article explores the link between modernity, materiality, consumption, and household economies by analyzing the 1970s Chilean-made tableware, Futura. It opens with a discussion about modernity as a self-aware period of thought and technical development in Western European countries. Next, the link between modernity and consumption is tackled by addressing the impact of capitalism in nurturing imaginaries about Western Modernity in non-western countries, especially in Latin America. The article tries to answer: How modernity is rendered as something actually graspable; therefore, purchasable, and how does this graspability allow modernity to lay claim over certain materialities as a prior condition for their existence? Thus, by exploring how Futura is perceived and experienced by users of its time along with an analysis of the discursive strategies of its advertisements, this article attempts to give an answer, merely provisional, about how modernity is encoded as a material property of things.