"Alfonso Bialetti (1888 - 1970) has since 1933 moved coffee consumption from urban space to nearly every Italian household. His successor and son, Renato Bialetti industrialized the production in the 1950s and sold roughly another 270 million octagonal pots internationally. Renato branded his own body into the logo and moved men, through his televised marketing campaigns, to “where they did not belong:” using the Moka Express in the kitchen. A modern design icon - coffee as a stimulus for hyper-individualism and material power - that was not able to fully transpose to the 21st Century.
When in late 2018 Bialetti Industries S.p.A. is facing bankruptcy, artist David Bergé started gathering and cataloguing Bialetti octagonal stove top coffeemakers in different sizes and models, as well as clones by other brands.
Although the Moka Express itself is part of the collection of major design museums around the globe, it is hard to find a genealogy of the products, critical literature or even (ironically, coffee table) books explaining and celebrating the history of Bialetti.
With his project Octagonal Orientation, Bergé will operate in the gaps left open by the archive, rather then producing evidence of this archive." (David Bergé)
