A Study on Waitressing

A Study on Waitressing is a multi-layered investigation of waitressing as a metaphor for gendered behaviour, societal expectations, and performing in public. Agostini examines the fictionalised “waitressing woman” through the restaurant’s stage, backstage, and performative spaces, focusing on everyday gestures, postures, objects, and visual codes of service work. At the centre is Agostini’s mother, whose movements and behaviours in the family restaurant explore labour, power, representation, and the gaze. Combining staged photography, archival images, collage, moving image, audio, and text, the project considers the theatricality of everyday life and the shifting boundary between public and private identity, vulnerability and strength, and mother and daughter.