Hotel, Sweet Hotel

Of all the stages of humanity, one of the most significant was probably the essential transition from nomadism to sedentary life. This Neolithic revolution enabled the transition from hunter-gatherer status to agriculture, pastoralism, and subsequently, commerce, giving rise to the concept of ‘home’. Associated with shelter, family, belongings, or the self, home oscillates between being a place, a feeling, or a way of being in the world. But what happens in our present of over-modernity, when, beyond migratory phenomena and mass tourism, a new nomadic culture seems to have re-emerged? We live in a liquid world, of constant flows, where displacement, change, and immediacy affect fundamental spheres of the human, such as family, profession, or home itself. In this context of globalized travel and mobility, the need to be hosted becomes more important than ever. The hotel industry—a human discipline that dates back to antiquity—is dedicated precisely to the art of providing that accommodation.

Hotel, Sweet Hotel is an extensive taxonomic collection of hotel room interiors and dependencies, made over more than two decades in a hundred countries spread across the five continents. Addressing disciplines as diverse as sociology, geography, architecture, or psychology, Hotel, Sweet Hotel is proposed as a tribute to travel and the human virtue of hospitality, exploring concepts such as difference, globalization, loneliness, or the traveler’s complicity with a space that, for a short time, becomes their home. Oscillating between the polarity of interior and exterior—whether through the physical frame of the window, or through the ubiquitous screens of the television, computer, or smartphone—, Hotel, Sweet Hotel displays, with subtle irony, a great variety of rooms and accommodations that point towards a kind of anthropology of travel.