Overview

Two Futures at the Table presents two speculative objects—Plato Atrio and Plato AC1C—as material explorations of Gentrified Food Futures. Developed after three years of research, the plates embody a central question: what future do we want to set at the table? One envisions community, the other isolation and standardization.

Context

Gentrified Food Futures explores how the comida corrida tradition reveals the relationship between aesthetics, culture, and gentrification in Mexico City’s Cuauhtémoc borough. Through expert interviews, conversations with neighbors and restaurant workers, collective mapping, and futures workshops, narratives emerged that inspired the creation of these two objects.

• Plato Atrio (Utopia): A ceramic piece with organic forms that invites sharing. It represents eating as a collective gesture, reminding us that the response to gentrification is not isolation, but the building of community around the table. The name, Atrio, evokes the atrium as a space where community begins. 

• Plato AC1C (Dystopia): A 3D-printed piece, wrapped in plastic and angular geometries. It symbolizes a future of solitude mediated by technology, a metaphor for the homogenization and erasure of neighborhood identity. Its name comes from research nomenclature, underscoring the divide between those inside who are in the know,  and those excluded from it.

Together, the plates act as aesthetic provocations—reminders that imagination itself is a political and resistant act.

Outcome

The objects are exhibited in the Furniture and Object section of the Abierto Mexicano de Diseño 2025. More than artifacts, they are mirrors of divergent paths: communities that preserve traditions and sensory diversity, or uniform environments where local identity fades under standardized aesthetics. The project invites reflection on how food can function both as a language of resistance and as a tool to imagine fairer, more vibrant, and more collective cities.