ABOUT
UPCOMING
EDITIONS
FROM 6 TO 9
a project by Jéssica Varrichio
August 9th - September 1st, 2024
A docket is a document describing something sold or taken to a customer. The dockets on display are from a specialty coffee shop in the City of London, where Varrichio was a staff member. While she worked there, she interfered in and collected over 150 dockets from March to July 2023.
Alongside the practical information: “Flat White to Take Away with 3 sugars to Hassan” or “Pour Over to Dine In to Table 1”, Varrichio inserted questions: “What is a woman?”, “What’s the shape of money?”, “If you shift to the right as you age, were you ever on the left?”.
Inspired by Fischli and Weiss’ Will happiness find me? (2003) and Cildo Meireles’ Insertions into Ideological Circuits (1970), this daily exercise was a counteract against the speedy, voracious, surroundings: the City of London is one of the main financial centres in the world, a place of abstraction (“What’s the shape of money?”) with millions of pounds in financial transactions and stocks flying over baristas’ heads making thousands of coffee a day.
The numbers are high, and financiers and baristas are driven by the adrenaline high of how much more can be made and how high we can go without ever questioning: “How much is enough?”. “Money makes money” is one of the City’s motto and apparently “flat white makes flat white”.
It is also a counteract against the speedy, mechanical work conditions in that café where 1.500 coffees are made per day. This means that the workflow is very well structured and streamlined: Taking orders and printing dockets, pulling coffee shots, texturing milk, pouring and calling names, you only perform one duty at a time and muscle memory carries you through the day. Every record break in the shop would be proudly celebrated until it burnt you out.
Coffee is a stimulating substance, the first coffee shop in the UK was established in Oxford where it became popular amongst university students and academics to sharpen their intellectual activities and discussions. During her time working as a barista, Varrichio couldn’t stop thinking about how that coffee shop, the most popular one in the City, was infusing and stimulating the UK’s economy. Such a banal act powered by its location, its consumers, and its production conditions, opens a path for questioning.
Most of the country’s decisions were made to benefit the interests enrooted in the City. Fourteen years of Tories’ rule blurred the difference between making politics and making business. Printing questions on dockets of coffee orders may be a small act, but it carries on the social aspect of an ancient Greek Agora. It transforms a private order into a public space where questions are posed to make us think about how we organise our lives, the meaning we give to things. It ignites conversations and exchanges points of view.
These dockets are thermal printed as most of the bills and receipts are. Thermal printers use heat to print instead of ink, the heated part turns black. The high sensitivity of the paper makes it short lasting, its life span is max 50 days. Every second that the dockets are in contact with light during the exhibition it will make them fade further and further until all of the written information completely fades away. Dockets is an oblation.
When a head and a book collide is the artist book of Under the Spell editions. A selection of dockets is published alongside a text of Varrichio’s experience working as a question writer, thermal printer publisher and barista.