JOURNAL DE HOTEL
CLICK HERE TO SEE ALL THE IMAGES OF JOURNAL DE HOTEL
Journal de Hotel consist of more than 40 photographs of beds in luxury hotels around the world. The series forms a sort of travel diary within a context temporarily given by circumstances of life in which each moment of these “stops” is captured and accumulates, as the Baudelairian flaneur accumulates experience, observing and feeling that life goes by.
In the pretentious decors that have always been part of the world of luxury, the ordinary experience that takes place in them subverts the meaning for which such sumptuous setting are so proudly created. Despite the impersonality of these places, a world of intimacy is presented, gently lit by bedside lamps, whose influence is such as to recall a dream of which an image remains when one wakes up, like a memory. Such was the origin of this diary in these non-places that belong to no one, but which in the end are as much yours as your own memories.
At a poetic level, little static set designs are presented which, rather than conveying anything anecdotal about the location, are accessed through personal aspects. This passage between the intimate and the impersonal makes the situation of the context ironic. It also involves the choice to show intimate things, but not in the perhaps harsh way of Tracey Emin. A more silent world is presented with a cold gaze. It unfolds among motifs marked with “distinction” but it has left traces of what it may have been –a presence of experience.
Little by little we approach a reflection on the world of luxury. This hotel environment that so strongly represents all that is impersonal, all that is neutral, becomes central to answering a question that would cover several aspects of what we are thinking. What is luxury today? The concept of luxury may remain or change in the context of our history. But it is true that in the last few years the very meaning of luxury has changed, and perhaps been globalized, losing one of its most distinctive features: namely exclusivity. Luxus is “excess”, but don’t we live in the era of excess, of accumulation? Accordingly images of beds are accumulated, with no change in viewpoint and yet differently lived in. Just as we all end up modelling our own concept of luxury on what we regard as exclusive in respect of our experience, we are driven to share luxury, even to spread it about within a certain aesthetic.
Through “Journal de Hotel” we approach a reflection on the world of luxury, a complex self-portrait of emotion and autobiography, an iconography of what is phantasmagoric about human presence, and ultimately, a rather optimistic view of passion in everyday life.
Comments