metropolis m

Talking over coffee is one of Raimundas Malašauskas’s social fortes. I realized it recently when I sifted through an email archive where he first proclaimed his coffee penchant to me. Instead of writing about coffee, he sent me coffee. Not your usual coffee though. This was a virtual cup, sent to 2011 from 2007. Raimundas snapped a picture of the creamy double espresso we drank together at Café de Carlo in Mexico City. It documents a daunting coffee magic act. An image and its flipside: two spoons, one cup, one spoon, one cup – voilà!

I always wondered why he sent this to me. Beyond simply connoisseurship, why in the world would a curator ramble on about coffee perfection? Years later, things became a little clearer. Like a conversation, coffee, as Raimundas would remark, ‘could be implied as a medium of sophistication and continuous excelling. Good espresso is about concentration too.’ I then learned that his coffee reveries, much like musings on contrasts and diversification, were ways to approach everyday variation – the how’s and do’s of making a heart-pumping fuel flawless.

That said, now I find myself in the 7ème arrondissement in Paris at the Coutume café on Rue de Babylone, the latest addition to the city’s burgeoning boutique coffee scene. Again we meet for coffee. Raimundas arrives wearing a t-shirt stylized in Vogue magazine lettering reading, ‘I am not from Paris. I am Paris.’ I order a latte. He starts out ordering a cold water 24-hour-drip coffee, but the waiter exclaims, ‘I’ve just put it on, come back tomorrow.’ Raimundas then settles for a French-style Guatemalan bean espresso with a micro-jar of hot water.

We begin talking by addressing ‘place’. I ask him, ‘What does it mean to be placeless, really?’ He responds by characterizing his life inside of the discontinuous chamber of his own actions and gestures, slippery and ether-like. Paris is his place for now because he enjoys Paris, but then I realize he’s everywhere in between times, like Brussels, Vienna, Kassel (he’s charted as one of the curatorial agents of Documenta (13)).

Read further in Metropolis M No 6-2011