Eleonora Agostini

A Study on Waitressing: Stage, Backstage, and Performative Realities

Text by Rocco Venezia

In Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that the body is not merely a passive object observed by others, but an active subject that shapes and is shaped by its surroundings. It is through the body that we navigate social spaces, perform roles, and reconcile the visible with the hidden. This philosophy finds a poignant echo in Eleonora Agostini’s A Study on Waitressing, which offers a rich meditation on labour, identity, and the interplay between public performance and private self.

At the heart of the work lies Agostini’s quiet observations of her mother since childhood, witnessing her dual roles as a mother and woman worker in their family restaurant. The project unfolds as an interdisciplinary exploration, blending photography, archival images, video, audio, and text to interrogate the three dimensions of theatrical experience—stage, backstage, and performance.

The stage is where the waitress performs her role for the public gaze, embodying composure, professionalism, and the expectations of others. In Agostini’s images, her mother—poised and attentive—represents the archetype of the ideal worker: affable, efficient, and invisible in her personal complexity. Yet, these portraits resist mere documentation. They are deliberately constructed to reveal the fragility of the staged persona, inviting the viewer to question the authenticity of the public-facing self.

Behind the backstage curtains, the unseen labour unfolds—complaints, exhaustion, and fleeting moments of reprieve. This hidden space symbolises the private realm where vulnerabilities emerge, away from the scrutinising eyes of customers. Through intimate portraits, archival materials, and her mother’s written anecdotes, Agostini foregrounds the tension between public strength and private fragility.

The performative dimension operates as the connective tissue between the stage and the backstage. It is in the gestures, the rehearsed phrases, and the seamless transitions between emotions that the performance of identity emerges. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical theory, Agostini positions her mother’s shifting personas as a critique of the societal roles imposed on women, particularly those in feminised labour. The performance is not merely an act; it is a negotiation between expectation and reality, where the body becomes, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty would say, the primary site of meaning-making and interaction with the world.

Agostini’s work challenges the viewer to see beyond the polished surface of the stage. Her mother’s figure is not only the subject of representation but also a co-author of the narrative, her gestures and movements creating a shared language that transcends time. The interplay between archival images and contemporary staging blurs the boundaries of memory and performance, creating a dialogue that questions the ownership of the image and the legacy of gestures passed through generations.

In an age increasingly defined by consumerism and self-representation, A Study on Waitressing asks us to consider: What lies behind the polished performance of the everyday labouring body? How do the gestures shaped by work and necessity reflect and resist the roles we inhabit? What happens when the audience looks beyond the stage? By dissolving the boundaries between the visible and the hidden, Agostini’s work reveals the body as a site of negotiation, a space where our perception of the staged and the real becomes fluid.

Exhibition: Gestures and Traces, Eleonora Agostini e Lucrezia Zanardi at Cartacea Galleria

Testo critico di Sara Benaglia e Mauro Zanchi

Da cosa nasce l’incontro tra Eleonora Agostini e Lucrezia Zanardi nella galleria CARTACEA? Dove sta il punto di contatto tra le loro ricerche e come viene trasformata la fotografia attraverso le due progettualità? Entrambe lavorano con la fotografia e, seguendo percorsi e modalità processuali distinte, stanno esplorando la vita e la storia di due figure femminili a loro care, persone fisiche realmente esistite e con cui si sono relazionate in modo specifico. Per Eleonora Agostini questa figura è la propria madre, per Lucrezia Zanardi è Etty Hillesum. Le loro ricerche sono nate da archivi – uno privato e l’altro pubblico – da cui hanno fatto emergere interventi interpretativi. Entrambe le artiste utilizzano una commistione di materiali differenti per costruire narrazioni complesse, le cui implicazioni logiche ricadono sulla definizione stessa di fotografia, che viene riscritta e svolta in modo personale. Il collage, forse, è la forma mediale a cui le loro formalizzazioni più si approssimano. Ma c’è di più. Perché la fotografia ha un valore trasformativo soprattutto verso il sistema sociale e relazionale di cui il medium è strumento ancillare.

Eleonora Agostini presenta da Cartacea la serie Study on Waitressing, iniziata nel 2018 e tuttora in corso. Il lavoro nasce quando l’artista realizza alcune fotografie in studio alla madre, mentre esegue un reenactment dei gesti eseguiti sul luogo di lavoro, durante il servizio in sala. Le fotografie che documentano il corpo nudo paiono della stessa matrice di quelle che comparivano nei libri del diciannovesimo secolo, consultati da pittori come studi anatomici. A differenza di quelle immagini, queste presenti nella serie dedicata alle posture e ai gesti lavorativi ripetuti quotidianamente dalla madre per anni devono essere osservate da un altro punto di vista, per trovare tutti i segni della stanchezza e del logorio imposto dal capitalismo alle classi meno abbienti, anche. Per due anni il progetto resta chiuso nell’archivio personale di Eleonora. Nel 2020 realizza il primo collage con provini a contatto ed esperimenti in camera oscura di quegli scatti. Il carattere compositivo dell’immagine è scelto per restituire l’idea di uno studio sulla figura. C’è anche una parentela semantica con i collage femministi realizzati da Hannah Höch nel Novecento? Riutilizzare immagini già prodotte e riassemblarle, la porta a notare un filo conduttore tra la figura della madre che reinterpretava in studio i movimenti e le posture da cameriera e il processo di creazione stesso. Il lavoro che siamo costretti a fare per sbarcare il lunario e guadagnare qualche soldo per sopravvivere lascia segni e calli sulle piante dei piedi, come illustrato in uno dei collage in mostra: una sorta di atlante fondato sul linguaggio di queste impressioni registrate dalla pelle. Durante la pandemia Covid, Agostini studia il waitressing e raccoglie fotografie in cui la madre si trova sul luogo di lavoro. Guardare la disciplina del corpo di lei innesca in Eleonora nuovi quesiti su cosa accade quando ci relazioniamo con il “nostro pubblico”. Espone diversi materiali originali provenienti dall’archivio di sua madre, aprendo una conversazione sociopsicologica sulla teatralità del quotidiano e in qualche modo della fotografia. Nota che la madre adotta le medesime pose assunte durante i servizi lavorativi anche nelle fotografie personali private, nelle sue foto in vacanza e con gli amici. Questa osservazione è l’inizio di uno studio sulla linea di relazione tra comportamenti privati e pubblici. A che punto la linea tra privato e pubblico inizia a sovrapporsi e fondersi? Study on Waitressing (2018-in corso) si sviluppa secondo due narrazioni: da un lato pone attenzione ai comportamenti, alle norme di genere e alle aspettative sociali; dall’altro entra in una relazione privata con la madre. Questa complessità si articola in diversi capitoli e materiali: collage composti da elementi che arrivano dalla camera oscura (una processualità che precede le prove di stampa); cutout di immagini d’archivio; un audio con un’attrice di voice-over che legge un manuale del 2017 con testi rieditati dall’artista; un libro in uscita a novembre con WittyBooks; il video Welcome, Sir dove la madre cerca di mantenere un sorriso per otto lunghi minuti; fotografie in cui lo spazio di lavoro è mostrato in modo teatrale, ispirate al lavoro di Erving Goffman sulla teatralità della vita quotidiana.

Lucrezia Zanardi espone Present Traces of Past Experiences (2020). Questa serie - composta da undici immagini, un audio e un libro - nasce dalla lettura in giovane età dei diari di Etty Hillesum. Zanardi rileggerà più volte questi diari, scoperti grazie a una cugina attrice. Nel tempo diventeranno il centro focale della propria ricerca e un modo per approssimarsi alla vita di una persona letta ma non conosciuta personalmente, dei cui pensieri si è andata ad appropriare. Decide di cercare nella contemporaneità le tracce di vita di Etty Hillesum. Dove cercarle? Nell’archivio ufficiale della scrittrice olandese, certo, ma anche nei luoghi da lei attraversati e in cui ha vissuto, ambienti che oggi ospitano altri abitanti. Come possono immagini fotografiche mostrare le esperienze passate di questa donna nelle tracce del presente? Ci sono sistemi relazionali nella contemporaneità che sono in grado di farle emergere? Fotografie storiche, appunti, grafia, nuove immagini che registrano gli spazi un tempo abitati dalla donna coesistono presentati in una serie di teche in cui tali materiali sono esposti in modo non lineare e non filologico, senza didascalie. Gli stessi vuoti della cornice diventano parte costitutiva di un progetto in cui l’immagine cerca di evocare la presenza di una donna conosciuta attraverso le pagine di un libro, una persona sconosciuta nel reale, ma vissuta come familiare. I materiali nelle teche sono tracce, non resoconti, del passato di lei. Sono i materiali stessi, gli affetti, e l’assenza di linearità ad esprimere l’eco di un dialogo silenzioso tra due donne che non si sono mai incontrate, ma che sono vicine. Tra i segni scelti da Zanardi ci sono anche la riproduzione su vetro della grafia di Etty Hillesum che trascrive una poesia di Rilke, un disegno della mano della scrittrice analizzata dal proprio psicochirologo. Nulla è raccontato direttamente, ma è reso attraverso dettagli visivi e di scrittura, insieme al diario di bordo dell’artista, che estende l’archivio ufficiale della donna morta nel campo di concentramento, compiendo un viaggio nei luoghi in cui aveva vissuto. La sua è una ricerca etnografica, che vuole includere l’emotività delle persone che risiedono ora negli spazi dove visse la scrittrice, l’atmosfera delle case, cosa significhi stare lì. L’artista è alla ricerca di punti di contatto magici, coincidenze tra gli abitanti attuali e ciò che permane ancora nella porosità delle pareti domestiche. La foto-documentazione dei luoghi si ispira a ciò che Zanardi ha visto negli archivi, ai dettagli di un particolare fisico, di un abitare spaziotemporale. L’emotività e gli arredi, sommati alla lettura dei diari, sono componenti di un fare intuitivo. In questa ricerca delle tracce di una vita, la macchina fotografica è uno dei tramiti attraverso cui fare agire nella contemporaneità una vita passata, ancora presente nelle trame del reale.

Chi sono le donne da cui siamo nate e quelle di cui abbiamo assorbito i pensieri, facendoli nostri? Ereditiamo una forma dai loro corpi e identità? Che tipo di medium diventa la fotografia quando apre un archivio verso dinamiche sociologiche e relazionali?

A Study On Waitressing, Peckham 24 2024 - Text written by Lillian Wilkie

As a child, Eleonora Agostini would sit in her family’s restaurant and observe her mother working front of house. Over lunch, she would study her mother’s movements as she circulated the restaurant, hearing her repeat the same phrases and entertaining the clients. Occasionally, she would witness her mother slip behind the curtain that led to the kitchen to complain about a customer, before smiling and returning to the restaurant floor as if nothing had happened. “The kindness she offered was both curious and irritating,” says Agostini. “Her ability to seamlessly shift between emotions, from resentment to politeness and from anger to pleasure, made me question the authenticity of our various personas.”

It is this shifting of personas, the performativity of social roles and its relationship with images that underpins A Study on Waitressing. The work assembles and re-presents photographs, archival imagery and footage, collage and text as a research method to analyse the theatricality of the everyday and the function of the body as a conduit between observer and observed. Photographs of the artist’s mother posed in a range of contexts are cropped almost to abstraction, emerging as a typology of poses that perhaps allows Agostini a degree of critical distance in the investigation of her mother’s postures and behaviours. From this maternal encounter, the work goes on to explore a fictionalised image of the waitressing woman—she who must be both invisible and hypervisible—through the metaphor of theatre, and the three dimensions that define it: the stage, the backstage and the performance. Within these spaces, a complex web of power relations, corporeal semantics and gendered stereotypes is interlaced around everyday acts of service. Also implicit in A Study on Waitressing is a comment on all the many contradictory personas contained within a mother’s life—especially that of a working mother—which must hold several conflicting truths simultaneously.

A Study On Waitressing, FOAM Talent 2024 - Text written by Pelumi Odubanjo

In her ongoing series A Study on Waitressing, Eleonora Agostini probes different understandings of what it means to stage performance using photography, and how we can challenge presumed notions of body, place, and time through performing for the camera.

In the series, Agostini centres on the body of her mother, drawing on languages of collage, staged portraits, textual, film, and archival, forming an interdisciplinary activation of narrative. Using her mother’s body as a conduit to explore ideas around demeanours and behaviours, Agostini questions what it means to re-intervene in the female body across different stages of time to reassemble narratives of women’s everyday lives. Agostini uses the role of the ‘waitress’, inspired by her mother’s occupation, to demonstrate a playful understanding of recurring gestures and social body language that can be activated in different parts of our lives. Across the series, she ultimately provokes the idea of the photograph as a site for transformation, one activated through gesture and action. In the set of images How to Stand in Front of the Camera, How to Stand in Front of the Client, Agostini relays this idea of the photograph as a site for transformation through the echoed gesture in her mother’s archival images, in this instance, the stance. Across the various settings, including a sandy beach, pavements, and several interior settings, moving from the presumed public space to private; we see Agostini’s mother standing before different backdrops, which imitate a character study. In doing so, Agostini questions how we look upon certain bodies in our societies. Do we view them as if they are singular objects? What is the relationship between object, subject, and body? And what do we choose to project onto such bodies through our own social inclination?

Across each image, Agostini’s intention as an author becomes more evident. In the presentation of her mother’s archival images, we see a unified crop which unites each image through their similar rectangular composition. In this visual harmony, Agostini stages these images as if a script that is followed by both her and her mother alike, creating a dialogue between the two women across time. Recognising the ways that a photograph may activate clear lines of what is obscured and what is not, she uses the crop to indicate a transfer of ownership of the image. This is not to say Agostini is ensuring the images are removed from the contexts in which they were made, but to imply the lineage of our family photographs, and how our family photographs can take on new life cycles when shared and observed through different generations and windows. In their uniformity, Agostini has permitted us to view her mother in this new form. She thus questions the relationship between object and subject, subject and body through a nuanced approach to composition that exists not as an afterthought to the work, but just as integral to the making of the image. In its staging, we observe Agostini’s desire to use the image as a theatre for performativity, where the line between performance and reality wears thin. In her text ‘What Gender is Motherhood?’, Nigerian writer Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí defines the ecology of motherhood as one existing in an ongoing state that is ‘otherworldly, pre-earthly, preconception, pregestational, presocial, prenatal, postnatal, lifelong, and posthumous’ Oyěwùmí's writing rethinks ways to understand motherhood beyond a purely genealogical construction, but also through fragments that exist through various times, spaces, and languages, and pervade western ideas of gender being understood through a role. In contemplating how gestures may be transferred through body and material over time, Agostini attests to Oyěwùmí’s understanding of the mother as one who exists before and beyond the body, into that of mark and gesture, thus disfiguring imperialist and European Enlightenment ideas that figure time and image as something directional, linear, and impossible to intervene within. Agostini creates a shared body of work that ensures the viewer becomes a participant, and the images, much like her family album, exist as part of a wider narrative.

Agostini ensures her images become a part of genealogy, existing within a world where matrilineage can be disassembled through how writers such as Oyèrónkẹ́, Saidiya Hartman (Lose Your Mother), and Alice Walker (In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens) and artists such as Jo Spence and Deana Lawson, amongst others, have envisioned across their works. A Study on Waitressing thus becomes a portal and passage where her images embody a place of care, intimacy, and attention, exuding a matrilineal connection that allows her mother’s body to exist within this ‘lifelong’ role of re performativity and re-enactment through an acknowledgement of the different forms our bodies can take across landscape and time.

A Study On Waitressing, Almanac Inn 2022 - Exhibition text written by Giangavino Pazzola

Combining photography, moving images and texts, Eleonora Agostini’s solo exhibition offers a first public presentation of A Study On Waitressing, a research focused on everyday life as representation. The relationship between social image and performativity is investigated through the figure of the artist’s mother, examining her postures, behaviors and actions during her job. Using either collages, images created by Agostini or coming from the personal archive of the woman, in A Study On Waitressing takes shape a formal coding of the physical identity of the artist’s mother in combination with various information, visible or hidden, present in the non-verbal communication expressed in her poses while performing her waitress duties. In this sense, the images appear “natural” and - at the same time - constructed, created or selected in such a way as to highlight their semantic ambiguity and the value of the staging.

If conceptually A Study On Waitressing is a research deeply rooted in the psychological and sociological interests that are inscribed in the path opened by Erving Goffman with his writings on the performative theatricality of the everyday and on the function of the body in the interpretation of social roles, this first presentation of Agostini’s project suggests potential future developments of a critical analysis of widespread visual stereotypes in contemporary consumer culture and narcissism, as suggested by Mike Featherstone in The Body in Consumer Culture (1982). Emphasizing the dimension of labour subordination and the performing self as case studies to reflect on individual representation in the public sphere, the artist underlines the stereotypical and unique icon of the working mother to show – by contrast - the possibility of being (also) “other”: mother, woman, waitress, adult, affable, professional, patient, authoritative etc. In the same way, mixing private and public dimensions and, at the same time, declaring the responses to the power relations given by the working body, it instigates the reaction of that “nomadic subject” theorized in the writings of Rosi Braidotti to avoid the traditional categories of gender representation.

From a linguistic point of view, by mixing documentation and interpretation of reality, Agostini’s work takes up certain themes present in different experiences of contemporary image-making. Above all, it is evident an attention to those researches connected to the investigation of subjectivity, born between the end of the seventies and the beginning of the ‘80s, which read and interpret social and affective relationships through the experience of the body, private and public life of the artist and their community of reference. From Lorna Simpson (for the photographic archive as source material) to Robert Mapplethorpe (for the use of portraits), from Cindy Sherman (for the staging in disguise) to Thomas Ruff (for the subjectivity of the medium), also in the case of Agostini, photography plays a constitutive role, not only documentary of the event, but also of the staged action.

GUP Magazine - extract from Domestic Intimacy, A Performed Reality - Eleonora Agostini and Inaki Domingo, written by Erik Vroons

As in the philosophy of Neorealism as practised in the 1950s, when Italian film directors were making use of non-professional actors (devoid of the self-consciousness that amateur acting usually entails), Eleonora’s father and mother are staging their role as instructed by the artist while at the same time continue to function as her relatives. In other images of this same project, we see the parents and other family members in awkward positions. Again, they are clearly performing a certain playful interaction, but as amateur actors they can meanwhile not disguise their true selves.

It’s really her house, of course, and the furniture of that place is in the garden of her actual parents, but Eleonora – self-empowered – transforms it all into an art space. The images included not only incorporate an act of creation, they also bring the labour of their acts to the foreground. However, despite making preparations beforehand, when she instructed members of her own family not unlike Iňaki Domingo did with his blood relatives, Eleonora also had to accept a certain amount of serendipity. Even though staging scenes to a certain extent, she could not fully anticipate the response of her parents.

Der Greif, Para Phrase - A Blurry Aftertaste by Eleonora Agostini and words by Sian Bonnell - extract

‘agency is not aligned with human intentionality or subjectivity…Crucially, agency is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has’. (Barad, 2007: 177-8)

‘The law of the “proper” rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own “proper” and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability.’ (de Certeau, 1984: 117). These photographs question space and place and in turn, the shifting politics of the domestic around notions of control and power. Are the parents playing along with her, content in allowing her to control them? She is reminded in the most physical way of that moment where they as older parents realised that the ground had shifted and it was not them anymore, leading things. Despite the humour these images generate feelings of unease; they are funny but as in all successful comedy a discomforting aftertaste lingers. The home has literally lost its place, becoming a space of disruption ‘a practiced place’ (ibid: 117). There is madness here and absurdity; the outside is playing at being the inside, in a scenario that parallels Lewis’s Looking Glass. The use of monochrome and deadpan allow the imagination to operate. Narratives emerge she is reminded of Virginia Woolf and Agatha Christie an odd pairing. Certainly, a murder will be committed at some point… It is all an illusion; everything must surely return to normal soon?

Pellicola Magazine - A Blurry Aftertaste, written by Michela Coslovich

A Blurry Aftertaste (2018-present), one of her most appreciated works, analyzes the complexity of the domestic space generating in-depth questions  about roles within the family, everyday objects and their uses.
The project came out during a particular moment of immobility and isolation: returned to her parents’ house and forced to live there for a certain period of time, her thoughts focused on the relationship with her family and her home.
She selected some intimate and personal objects found inside the house, moved them into the garden and let the family members creating a structures and installations, while she photographed and filmed their labour.
Some of the objects represent activities or spaces, while others evoke suggestions and emotions.
Using her words: “with the photograph Relaxation Island I refer to sleeping and remarrying, using all those intimate objects that come in contact with the body. With Angolo Cottura I relate to the kitchen, with What Once Was, which shows a pile of various and unrelated objects, I tell the story of those objects that are kept, waiting to get ridden. Childhood shows us the clothes that belong to a past time, which have been folded and arranged on the grass like a yard salt. Other images, on the other hand, are  a documentation of installations and objects that were not meant to be photographed. Mole Trap, for example, is a mole trap built by my father and left in the garden for weeks.”
The result of this process is a collaboration between people and disciplines that leads to a series of questions about everyday life. Her house is a stage in which memories and bonds are reconstructed and the concept of intimacy analyzed.
Theoretical ideas that accompanied Eleonora in this work were the most varied: starting from The poetics of space by Gaston Bachelard, a text that explains the way in which the various spaces are able to evoke certain sensations and emotions; then move on to Dogtooth a film by Yorgos Lanthimos, the works of Gordon Matta Clark, Katerina Seda and Rachel Whiteread.

The family has always been a central element in Eleonora’s work: in her most recent project entitled A Study on Waitressing (2020), her interest focuses on the figure of the mother, on her movements in relation to her job as a waitress.
By analyzing her gestures, her thoughts and her relationships with other people, she tries to understand how the job we decide to perform in our life affects not only our individual identity, but also our collective way of acting. A story about essence and existence, in which one becomes the other and vice versa.

Eleonora herself defines her projects as autobiographical, starting from intimate and subjective experiences that are often the result of memories and emotions lived and reworked through her artistic process.
Thanks to this we are able to understand a personal research path that is not afraid to open up, which presents itself to the viewer even in its most delicate and private aspects, certainly the most fascinating.
Eleonora’s photographic work develops a more extended level of meaning, not limiting itself to be a mere representation of reality but becoming the final result of a much more articulated process.
An embrace between performance and photography that leads to the definition of new visions of reality.

Paper Journal - A Blurry Aftertaste - Interview with Paola Paleari

In her 1997 book Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory, Marianne Hirsch describes how, right after its invention, photography quickly became the family’s primary instrument of self-knowledge and representation, “the means by which family memory would be continued and perpetuated, by which the family’s story would henceforth be told.” Seen under this light, the apparently harmless and banal family picture is, in fact, a very powerful form of visual record.

Italian photographer Eleonora Agostini, born 1991, seems to be aware of the deceptive nature of family photographs and acquainted with the fact that they shape us as much as we frame them. Through her project A Blurry Aftertaste (Paper Journal, 2019), Agostini explores this territory in search of an alternative look to a genre that is one of the most insidious to handle, being simultaneously emotionally charged and culturally constructed. She does so with determination and grace, in a cleverly playful mix of performance, installation, sculpture and photography that is ultimately a reflection on the photographic medium as such.

Unseen Platform - A Blurry Aftertaste

Set within the parameters of Eleonora’s family home in Italy, A Blurry Aftertaste examines family dynamics, domesticity and the role of labour within the domestic sphere. At first glance, the images appear quite subdued in tone, partly attained by Eleonora’s use of black and white photography and introspective eye. But much goes on under the surface. Through a series of performative experiments involving family members and found objects from around her home, Eleonora creates peculiar, theatrical scenes by repurposing household objects and reimagining everyday practices.

FotoRoom - A Blurry Aftertaste

Eleonora’s main interest as a photographer lies in “what we perceive to be banal and what is often actually overlooked. Within my practice I explore the objects, activities, and apparatuses that belong to everyday experiences in order to find fractures in this perception, and from those gaps new meanings of the familiar. Observing and reenacting are core actions within my practice and key parts of how I investigate the ways in which the human experience is constructed and how time is perceived.”