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.