Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. Splendide Hotel. From March 13 to October 19 2014

There are several reasons that brought me to the idea of turning it into the Splendide Hotel, and they are all somehow connected to the year in which the palace was built 1887, the year of construction of the palace.

It’s not at all nostalgia for the past or… It’s a time travel in the sense of exploring the future as much as the past but it’s not nostalgia.

It's also about radicality and radical ideas: it's not just a comfortable space - but there are all these books and the empty room, that are like open questions to a different way of representing , of writing... to much more radical art.

Some of them were written in 1887: for example, there's the incredible sci-fi novel A Crystal Age, which is this amazing sci-fi book, but also the interior monologue Les lauriers sont coupés, by Edouard Dujardin, which is from 1887. There are some books by writers born in 1887, there are books that include somehow in the narration a crystal palace, others include in: for example, Dostoyevski's Notes from Underground, where he is criticizing the Crystal Palace. There is a book by Villa-Matas, and some theatre by Chejov ts written at the time, a book by Jean Genet which is called Splendid's…. So you know the bibliography is there, grouped, to form even a new book.

Something that has been fictionalised and still with limited elements- it’s not hyperrealistic- it’s still a very metabolized set of references. It’s more about finding signs and structures and archetypes that allow this trip rather than faking something.

It’s also funny to imagine a hotel that has no rooms except for a forbidden room that is more like a time capsule and you don’t know exactly what it contains. There will be surprises in this room- It’s really the part I cannot speak about, but if u come by several times it might change, you know, l8ike a stage for something that has happened, might happen, will happen…