Daniel Kötter

No Hotel

music theatre video performance

 

object collection/Elisa Limberg/Daniel Kötter

No Hotel

7-22 september, 2013

Incubator Arts Project, New York City

 

"We start with the idea of a hotel being like a theater and a theater like a hotel. Hotels and theaters have various things in common. They are both places where life is simulated but also suspended. Nothing real happens in hotels and also nothing real happens in theaters and yet in both locations life looks like it is (or appears to be) taking place.

But you aren’t expected to go about your daily business such as taking out the trash or cleaning up your laundry or making your bed or even speaking to your neighbor. You can come and go unhindered by responsibilities and expectations. You can witness a vision of the world from the protective coating of a glass façade or an anonymous uncomfortable folding chair. What happens in the hotel or the theater stays in the hotel or theater, and things can happen there that have no effect on the normal transactions of your daily routine.

The glass façade of a hotel where you can see everything that happens inside the hotel from the outside and where you can see everything that happens outside the hotel from the inside is like a little theater stage where a visual exchange is made between observers. The hotel occupants put on a show for the passers-by and vice versa. The floor-to-ceiling windows allow occupants to have a full floor-to-ceiling view of the city outside without forcing them to venture out into it. The hotel room is a safe zone of maximum visibility. Which brings us to the second thing that hotels and theaters have in common: they both function as a benign interface for the visual exchange between people

So theater audiences are like passers-by and hotel occupants are like actors. But inversely theater audiences are like hotel occupants and actors are like passers-by watching you as you watch them from your secure vantage point. And everyone is a tourist. If only the uncomfortable chairs could be transformed into beds. If only the clean laundry never stopped. If only the walls were made of glass. If only we didn’t need to leave this room, which we don’t. If only this theater and that hotel room could dissolve into each other which they do."