Stressed, blessed
and coffee obsessed

Débora Delmar

31 Jan – 30 Mar 2019

GALLLERIAPIU, Bologna

Photos by Stefano Maniero

“Coffee is the only place where discourse creates reality, where gigantic plans, utopian dreams and anarchic conspiracies are born without having to leave your chair”.

Cafés as hybrid places between function and leisure, consumption and production, social and personal. Débora Delmar (1986) project is an attempt to find a link between Cafés’ function and gallery’s space, considering how much aesthetic choices have an influence on our behavior inside those spaces.

Débora Delmar investigates consumer culture, capitalistic lifestyle, and aspirational aesthetic. She is particularly focused on class issues and globalization effects on daily lives, as well as cultural hegemony and gendered, racial and class images used in advertising.

“Stressed, blessed and coffee obsessed” is more than a quote; it is a way of being connected to contemporary issues like the furious pace of our society and it underlines how social consciousness can be reinforced by consumers habits.

At GALLLERIAPIU, the artist explores the European Café Culture influence in the development of cities, social relationships and interactions and in contemporary lifestyle. The European Café was originally considered as a social hub, a place for artists and intellectuals to meet. Nowadays, depending on its context, cafés could become status symbol, or represent hipster subculture and tradition’s images.

Café’s traditional identity as intellectual and artist’s hubs for cultural production have nowadays shifted. Since the early 90’s  global coffee chains have been appropriating from the original European Café style architecture, furniture and decor. In this way, these contemporary consumer spaces have fashioned fictional authentic aesthetics and experiences. Café becomes a brand keeping a typical specific image.

For here first solo show in Italy, Delmar uses some shoots from her iPhone images gallery she took while travelling around cafés between Mexico City, Vienna, Beijing, Venezia and London. She creates a new environment that develops and invades the whole exhibition space through a series of new works and a sound installation. According to her modus operandi, the gallery space changes in relation with logics and mechanism linked to actual bars’ dynamics.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a critique publishing of an editorial project in collaboration with Droste Effect Magazine, curated by Vincenzo Estremo. This publishing will be presented at the end of the exhibition. The bulletins designed by Vincenzo Estremo and Débora Delmar will firstly investigate on the entire practice of the Mexican artist based in London, and then they will analyze some social and political issues connected to Café dissemination in Europe and Latin America. Starting from a cross-disciplinary attitude and relying on cultural studies, the artist and the curator will piece together some theoretical and iconographic documents in order to share all the different facets of the globalized culture of coffee and Cafés.

Débora Delmar, “Exclusive Provider 1-2 (MarbleDispenser)”, 2018
Débora Delmar, “Exclusive Provider 1-2 (MarbleDispenser)”, 2018, detail
Débora Delmar, “Italian Souvenir”, 2019
Débora Delmar, “Italian Souvenir”, 2019
Débora Delmar, “Total Living”, 2019
Débora Delmar, “Total Living”, 2019, detail
Débora Delmar, “IPhone Photo Archive (Cafés)_ Relax in Style (Mayfair, London)”, 2019
Débora Delmar, “IPhone Photo Archive (Cafés)_ Coffee, Coffee, Coffee! (Soho, London)”, 2019
Débora Delmar, “Stressed, Blessed and Coffee Obsessed”, exhibition view
Débora Delmar, “Stressed, Blessed and Coffee Obsessed”, exhibition view
Débora Delmar, “Stressed, Blessed and Coffee Obsessed”, exhibition view
Débora Delmar, “Exclusive Providers (White Marble Stacked Chairs)”, 2019
Débora Delmar, “Daily Mirror (Instagram Archive @philipdeml )”, 2019
Débora Delmar, “Coffee Coffee Coffeeeeeeeeee” and “Infinite Scroll”, 2019
Débora Delmar, “Coffee Coffee Coffeeeeeeeeee” and “Infinite Scroll”, 2019
Débora Delmar, “Stressed, Blessed and Coffee Obsessed”, exhibition view
Débora Delmar, “Infinite Scroll”, 2019
Débora Delmar, “Infinite Scroll”, 2019

Stressed, Blessed and Coffee Obsessed
Débora Delmar

 

at GALLLERIAPIU, Bologna
2.02.2019 – 30.03.2019

 

Photos by Stefano Maniero, courtesy GALLLERIAPIU and the artist

 

GALLLERIAPIU

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