Installation site-specific. Hotel Locarno, Roma, 2013
Every place, whether it seemingly anonymous or strongly characterized, contains within its walls a memory of itself.
This project stems from the desire to transform the demolition of a hotel in a work of art, in order to highlight it’s hidden history and reveal unexpected relationships. Suspended on a boundary, between place and non-place, between public and private, between movement and stillness, the hotel is a spot where one lives in a different way from how one lives at home. Despite this some hotels may become, for some, a home. The Locarno, with its rooms all different from each other and it’s history, it is certainly more “home” than others…
But a hotel is primarily a place of passage. The idea of transit, of non-permanence, which reflects in a way the human nature, it is always an ingredient of these places and although the walls of the hotel are always the same, within them many different stories are experienced, even if at first sight it is difficult to see the traces of what happened.
With the eyes of someone used to see the world from another point of view, the artists have tried to find some of these tracks and made them reappear on the surface.
Crash, sight specific installation composed of existing walls and furniture, sound tracks and specifically designed objects and located in the decontextualized space of an hotel under renovation, reflects on the precarious nature of the human experience. A work in balance between the liberating desire to crash everything to create something new and the desire to preserve a memory: fragments of stories, sounds, suggestions, which make up a layered narration, broken and circular at the same time.
Inside the rooms, gutted, but still full of furniture, phones were ringing, inviting the visitor to answer, to hear from time to time a different story. These stories, collected by interviewing people who have worked for years at the hotel and the owners, were then rewrote by artists and read live on the phone by members of the hotel staff.
Part of the project is also CrashCamera, a video that is not only a documentation, but an original work in itself, born from a reflection on the relationship between narrative and architecture, the transitory nature of life and the difficulties of communication that characterizes many human relations.
