Hotel Xenos

Soulangh Cultural Park, Tainan, Taiwan

November 27 - (permanent), 2019

 

Permanent installation in Soulangh Cultural Park.

Hotel Xenos represents a post-anthropocentric approach to questions about what constitutes the built environment. It is also an experiment in radical hospitality: a sharing of space without any preclusion of ownership or hierarchy of residents. Here, the human and the non-human, the endemic and the alien, are all equally welcome.

Materials: Bamboo, concrete, sand, earth.

'Guestbook', produced parallel to 'Hotel Xenos', is a photographic inventory of birds in the park, where they originate from and where they reside. It functions as a resource for visitors to Soulangh as well as an extension of the installation's guest/host thematic. Flick through it here.

"Pure and unconditional hospitality, hospitality itself, opens or is in advance open to someone who is neither expected nor invited, to whomever arrives as an absolutely foreign visitor, as a new arrival, nonidentifiable and unforeseeable, in short, wholly other. l would call this a hospitality of visitation rather than invitation."

Jacques Derrida, Philosophy in a Time of Terror

"ξένος • (xénos) m (genitive ξένου); second declension
1. of parties giving or receiving hospitality: host and, much more commonly, guest
2. stranger"

wiktionary.org