MANI
FESTO
POETIC HOTEL
Manifesto
19th January 2020
THE POETIC HOTEL IS A SPACE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC AND INACCESSIBLE
1. The installation
The “Poetic Hotel” is a contemporary art installation set up in Padova on the inside of a hotel which has been abandoned since 1997, and has been reopened for the first time in 2019.
The rooms, left as they were found, in their state of decay and abandonment, have become a space for intense and spontaneous artistic activity, realized through installations, paintings, sculptures, photographs, poetry, performances and other forms of artistic and poetic expression.
The artists, the hotel ‘guests’, have interacted and have intervened in the rooms, and in the spaces available for the set-up of the artworks, starting from the evocative atmosphere, elaborating their personal vision of the Hotel, of the abandonment and the time travel between then and now, reanimating in both the lived and living lives, the fabric of history and time that characterize this site.
The format, patented in S.I.A.E, blooms from an idea of Simone Berno who, with the spontaneous participation of other 30 artists, has realized the artwork in synergy and collective collaboration.
An extraordinary event, far from every usual means of diffusion of contemporary art, external to any museum circuit or gallery. Once having elaborated the internal spaces, the event ‘Check-Out’ officially put an end to the period of installation of the artworks in the rooms, and it is the decisive moment in which the artists separate from their pieces, bestowed with what we can now define as the “artistic person” “Poetic Hotel”.
THIS HOTEL IS CLOSED AND WILL REMAIN CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC
The hotel rooms are inaccessible. The installations set up internally, relegated to the inexorable passing of time, will no longer be able to be admired in real life until the Hotel structure is dismantled, and together with it the whole artistic collection will thus be destroyed.
Only then will it be possible to recover the artworks, through the rubble of the Hotel.
2. The Poetic Hotel today: from the installation to the artistic project
The “Poetic Hotel” represents a paradigm with respect to contemporary art in the direction of experimental and avant garde innovation, in which the artistic expression is formed, before focalizing on a single piece, as a complete experience, immersive and disorienting, an installation by all means, beyond any support or direct interference of the spectator, guest, observer.
This space, today, is also configured as a workshop, a cultural and artistic laboratory, a space for creation and experimentation, a forge of ideas continuously and mutually dialoguing with the external atmosphere, constantly renewing itself as a new interlocutor in the urban fabric of the city.
To allow for such an artistic contamination to come to life, only a part of the “Poetic Hotel” will continue to be accessible. In particular, the Reception, visible from the window of the Hotel, the ‘Pensieve’ and the Studio, defined as the ‘middleground’, are accessible to the artists and to guests exceptionally invited to participate in experiences and performances. A site of creation and contamination, a creative workshop, practical for use and well-furnished. The “Poetic Hotel” is and will therefore be a point of collision, engagement and communication between artists, performers, writers, critics, curators and musicians, all sensitive towards the infinitesimal poetic expressions of art.
3. The integrity of the Poetic Hotel
Thanks to the contribution of all the artists whom are involved, the “Poetic Hotel” presents itself as a unique and integrated entity, an “artistic person” in fact, in juxtaposition to “physical or legal people”, which used to be part of the Hotel in the real past world.
Thus, such “Poetic Hotel” is each and every one of the artworks that compose it. No piece could be eliminated or be purchased, being part of a location publicly inaccessible and therefore formally inexistent if not in the forms of digital reproduction.
The Hotel rooms will remain closed to the public to protect the spaces and the sites set up with artworks, in order to avoid that the abundance of visitors leads to the alteration of the microclimate created in these 23 years of abandonment.
4. The creative action of the Guest as an artist
In full creative freedom, the only essential limitation for the artist, was, and will be the contextualization of the site, being itself marked by the passage of thousands of people accommodated at the Hotel while it was active:
hundreds of lives lived (the passing of which is testified by the historic records of the hotel) and every one of which has left a trace of their stay, between the walls of the rooms, and those of the hall. Anxieties, love, distress, the wait, suggestiveness, fear, worries that the artists have been able to captivate room by room rendering each of these emotions and sentiments creatively explicit through their artworks, and continue to do so.
Not only does the artist relate to a location, but mould their work starting from the very context factor, giving life to other mutable scenarios through installations and performances which recount unheard stories, personal or the result of artistic elaboration, intertwining with those of other artists, in constant and spontaneous exchange with the realization in progress of the “Poetic Hotel”.
The invitation is thus that to approach this place, a guardian of disruptive passions, reanimating the atmosphere of sense and substance of what once was a place of pulsing life (in this case, testified by the Hotel Guest archive)
5. The poetry of inaccessibility
The art of the Poetic Hotel invites one to change their perspective of the world of art, becoming part of it, sinking into the creativity, inspired by imagination rather than by perception, one that melts with the recount of the artists, with the recount of time; recomposing the form of the artwork through the interface of contemporary coexistence, new stories of the installations and the pieces that compose it are therefore made possible, referring to the memory of the place that hosts, translating it into visible form.
6. The component of performance in the Poetic Hotel
The performances will take place on the inside of the site and will be accessible only through digital means such as videos and photographs, in addition to the projections visible from the window of the Hotel. The artistic production will also be developed externally but nonetheless inserted in the artistic project, coherent with the poetry of the location and in accordance with the artistic directors of the performances (signed off “Poetic Hotel” with or without reference to the artist creator of the performance).
Every artist will have access to the “Poetic Hotel” for a limited period, enough to permit the construction of the performance. Once the performance is completed - defined beforehand in terms of expressive form, poetry, and number of replicas, and in accordance with the Artistic Directors - the artist will go back to being a simple spectator.
The “Poetic Hotel” lends itself to be a place of performance: Dance, Theatre, Experimental Videos, Musical and Poetic production.
In particular, there is a distinction between two types of performances that can be developed:
1) Site-specific Performance: Performances of which the content is strictly connected to a room: elaborations, new visions of the contemporary art installation, inaugurated with the event Check-Out held on the 13th December. Such performances will be executed in tight correspondence and collaboration with the artist, creator of the room.
2) Independent performances: the performer (poet, writer, dancer, actor), through the “Poetic Hotel”, can transmit something different, original, which is in need of a new voice. In this case, the production is entirely independent and is strictly tied to the experience and interpretation of the performer at the site.
7. The Art Directors
The Artistic Directors of the performing arts will be temporary and will annually be replaced at their discretion, from Art Director to Art Director, prior to the consulting between the project creator, the property of the “Poetic Hotel” and the Artistic Directors in charge. A deviation from the rule of annual turnover of Artistic Directors will be permitted, if necessary, solely in the first year of affairs, 2020, as the project is in a phase of structural development.
PHX