In this live podcast recording, Gem Fletcher speaks with Eleonora Agostini about her project A Study on Waitressing. 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.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.

Eleonora Agostini's work will be on display in Copeland Gallery 17th-26th May during Peckham 24.

Gem Fletcher is a writer and host of The Messy Truth podcast, a series of candid conversations that unpack the ways in which images shape our world and what it means to be a photographer today. 

The Messy Truth X Peckham 24 is a series of live podcast recordings hosted at this year's festival engaging some of photography’s most dynamic talent in candid conversations about their recent work and wider practice.

Book your ticket here.