Hotel Vacation: Bianca Brunner

Hotel Vacation: Bianca Brunner

‘All of us (artists, critics, curators, historians, viewers) need some narrative to focus our present practices- situated stories, not grands recits’ 1

Shot in an abandoned hotel near Zurich, the series of photographs ‘Hotel Vacation’ deals with the subject of time and memory to evoke the experiences of temporariness and vacating associated with hotel rooms. Being places where different people arrived and departed in short periods of time, these abandoned spaces are characterised by their potential to contain multiple stories and collective memories of communities.

The concept of community here is not one of totality, but one that is structured in co-existential experience of ‘being with’- a question of community raised by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy in The Inoperative Community 2. Brunner is interested in the way in which hotel rooms shape temporary communities, structuring them not on the basis of specific social or cultural groups, but on the notion of shared experiences of temporary living with-others. For Brunner therefore abandoned hotels are ideal spaces to look for traces of collective memory of this nature and to illuminate them through the medium of photography.

Central to Brunner’s project is her refusal to adopt a documentary approach. She says, “I was never interested in any way of documenting the hotel, it could probably have been any abandoned hotel”. The hotel where the photographs were taken in 2005 is a famous nineteenth century health spa very popular with tourists. It was shut down in 2002 as it became increasingly unaffordable. Rather than making photographs for the purposes of documentary, she takes a psychoanalytical approach in which she considers instead the connotation of hotels as spaces where the atomistic model of a place or community disintegrate; and thereby explores the physical and psychological atmosphere one can find in abandoned hotels.

Making physical interventions into the found place, which she calls small interventions, a kind of still-life is created in which traces of the past are re-made into metaphors of collective memory; by opening the door a bit more, or by placing a basket or a person; by playing with mirror reflections and lighting, objects in the room are blurred, and light is focused intensively on edges framing the view. By way of this mediation, the distinction between the past and the present overlap in a suspended moment of consciousness, transforming the photograph to an ‘emblem of uncanny remembrance’.

Deepa Bhandari
2006.
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1. Hal Foster, Design and Crime (and other diatribes), Verso, New York, 2002, p. 128
2. Jean Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1991