Cabinet of commodities

“Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.”
— Erich Fromm

“The commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour, within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation, between men, themselves, which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”
— Karl Marx, Das Kapital

The “cabinet of commodities” is incorporating a request from Perrakis Papers to display paper samples for packaging applications. By substituting “curiosities” with “commodities,” we are aiming to address the difficult topic of basic human needs and the challenging speculation around them. Those packagings for packaging play a game that balances between commodification and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Through “curious” paper-thin surfaces, we address the delicate boundary between “need” and “needless” attempting an open relational word game. The word “fire” is displayed on the outside of a matchbox, and when opened, it appears linked to the word “love” in the inside. On pasta packaging, we are reading “safety,” “community,” and “ritual.” Inside a golden box with “time” on the lid, we find encapsulated the words “hope” and “purpose”. In other words, the seemingly ordinary objects surrounding us could, in our perspective, be processed as existential literature.

“Cabinet of commodities” was firstly presented at Syskevasia Expo and we designed a spatial setting turning the inside of the cabinet to an outside experience, making a crossover space between supermarket and storage room.

Packaging production by Psillidis
Images by Koralia