ABSTRACT
Between January 1971 and September 1973—amid Salvador Allende’s Socialist government—the National Chilean Technological Research Committee (INTEC) Design Group developed different projects for consumer, capital, and public use goods. These goods would be produced by the nationalized industrial platform and distributed by various State programs and the market, thus implementing a specific experience regarding the role of design in defining the material culture of socialism. This experience involved the creation of around 90 objects, most of which were never produced, given the interruption of the project by the civil-military coup on September 11th, 1973. The absence of a material trace for this attempt to bridge functionalism and socialism in the context of Latin American developmentalist policies has kept this experience out of the official accounts and the historiography of design in Chile. Delving into this void, Commons Goods is practice-based artistic research focused on the material recreation of these objects to deliver a material body to this history. The reconstruction of these objects, their dissemination as images, their circulation in exhibitions, and the debate about their current ownership have been developed as an exercise that aims to test and explore the relationship between objecthood and the conformation of collective property and memory.
