Project:
Hotel rooms are strange spaces. They provide both, the essentially familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. As a type of non-place their lack of distinct characteristics confronts the individual with a not quite empty space, akin to a basic stage allowing for mechanisms of projection and the re-imagination of „world“ more than other places.
Over the course of 18 months I investigated „Hotel Leipzig“. Effectively this is a space-time composite fabricated from 23 low to medium priced business hotels and hostels around the city center of Leipzig where I stayed for work related reasons. The resulting family of photos looks at a space where the private and the public intersect, where memory and oblivion mingle. Grouped and as a sequence they render both a peculiar non-portrait of a city (and of a time period) and simultaneously a contemplation of a form of existence stemming from that prototypical room for rent that is familiar to the contemporary traveler „away on business“. It explores, albeit with some distance, a state of mind, a mood or an atmosphere that takes over in one form or another all those anonymous individual guests of these spaces and that is tied to the specific economic and societal conditions that come along at the beginning of the 21st century in the wake of a post-capitalist society that has not really come to terms yet with its heritage of modernity. In the end it is the story of this imaginary Hotel Leipzig that we all are familiar with. In other words, the project invites the viewer to engage with the views on display and reconstruct his/her own „Hotel Leipzig“.
Presentation as Environment:
HOTEL / LEIPZIG is an environment including a set-like material allusion to a hotel room, a collection of photographs on display, an archive and a text. The installation is based on the photographic research project and the resulting book that focuses exclusively on low to medium budget hotels all in the city of Leipzig between 2012 and 13 through the lens of a contemporary traveller „away on business“. Ideally situated in a white cube context, this environment combines hotel furniture as objet trouvés and stage elements with photos from „HOTEL LEIPZIG“. A mental map type of arrangement drawn/directly applied to the wall would be preferred.
