2023-12-11 15:59:49
Screw it on, put the water in, put the insert in, put the coffee in, screw it on and put it on the stove: the steps required to make a coffee from the Bialetti are almost a small ritual. The octagonal jug with the mustachioed man printed on it is one of the cult design objects of the 20th century. A mass-produced aluminum pot that allows anyone with a stove to easily make their own espresso.
Well, wait: it’s not that simple. Coffee purists would not call what comes out of the Bialetti espresso, but rather mocha. That’s why the pot is officially called Moka Express. Real espresso is made with a pressure of 9 bar, the Bialetti can’t even manage a third of that. And yet, the pot is cult and can be found in shared apartments, Air BnBs and normal kitchens all over the world – for 90 years. The jug was invented by Alfonso Bialetti, who then built a factory in the Italian industrial triangle between Milan, Turin and Genoa, in the small town of Crusinallo.
„Monster des Anthropozäns“
The Belgian artist David Bergé has compiled a wide variety of versions of the jug for his photo book “Bialetti – A Catalog”. He doesn’t drink any coffee himself. Bergé is rather fascinated by the story of the Bialetti. And from the factory in Crusinallo, Italy, an imposing, modern building that looks like a stylized airplane from above.
In the 1950s: Workers pour molten aluminum into the mold of the Moka Express. : Image: picture alliance
Where the Moka Express was once mass-produced is now an industrial ruin. Crusinallo was one of the industrial centers of post-war Italy, explains David Bergé, “a thriving industrial city that played an important role in Italy’s second wave of industrialization.” In addition to Bialetti, the competitor Alessi also set up shop there (yes, the one with the lemon squeezer). “The region was best known for producing household appliances from a new material: aluminum.”
And right in the middle: the Bialetti factory. It is these “monsters of the Anthropocene” that interest Bergé in his work, he says. For one work, he walked through an unfinished subway tunnel with a group of interested people. His installation “The Voyage Piece” shows photos from 1911 that two young men named August Klipstein and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret took on a trip to strange places. Jeanneret would later become a world-famous architect as Le Corbusier. “I’m interested in the moment when things are not quite what they should be – or are no longer what they should be.”
David Bergé: Bialetti – A catalogue, Spector Books, Leipzig 2023. Hardcover, 80 pages, 69 illustrations, 24 euros. : Image: spector books
Nobody knows how many models there are
Bergé’s book somehow also falls into this “not quite yet” category: his Bialetti catalog shows photos of various models of the famous jug, sometimes made of pink plastic (a toy), sometimes classic made of silver aluminum or even with a top made of painted porcelain. Nobody knows exactly how many different models there are, says Bergé.
There are no records from the company and no one knows exactly which pots were manufactured and when. “Bialetti – A Catalog” is the first attempt to create a comprehensive catalog of the jugs that the Italian company has manufactured, but it is not yet complete.
David Bergé collected the jugs for his collection from everywhere: from friends’ kitchens, from flea markets and of course from the Bialetti flagship stores. “So many jugs have passed through my hands since 2019.” Even the very first Bialetti, which never went into series production and of which there are only three pieces. Today, Bergé’s collection includes 62 jugs that he photographed for the catalog.
The ninetieth birthday of the Moka-Express, the illustrated book, a small exhibition in Leipzig’s Grassi Museum and countless barista videos that reflect on how to make the best coffee with a pot make it almost easy to forget that the manufacturer Bialetti has been around for a long time was in crisis mode. In 2018 there was a threat of insolvency and the company was in a “tense financial situation,” as it was said. Coffee habits had changed and the mass-produced aluminum pot, which required so many steps, was no longer in demand. Capsules and fully automatic machines had overtaken it. The Bialetti is still an icon, Bergé notes: “The only question is, why don’t we use it anymore today?”
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He estimates, quite abstractly, that today we simply have a different relationship with how we interact with physical objects. Swipe instead of unscrewing. “As I see it, Bialettis are now only used by a few artists or romantics, let’s say 0.1 percent of coffee drinkers.” But it’s quite a ritual, this unscrewing, water in, insert in, coffee in , screw it on and put it on the stove.
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