The beginning of the 21st century brought a profound change in the modes of hospitality. The movement of people increased. Traditional establishments found themselves in disarray when private accommodation was made available to travelers free of charge or for a fee. Hospitality, considered a legal and moral obligation in…

The beginning of the 21st century brought a profound change in the modes of hospitality. The movement of people increased. Traditional establishments found themselves in disarray when private accommodation was made available to travelers free of charge or for a fee. Hospitality, considered a legal and moral obligation in pre-industrial society, became an offense. In France, "any person who, through direct or indirect assistance [...] facilitated the illegal stay of a foreigner in France will be punished by five years' imprisonment and a fine of 30,000 euros." Faced with this politicization of hospitality and the multiplication and intertwining of travelers' identities, the hotel, like the inn in the Middle Ages, appeared as a bygone mode of hospitality to which a form of nostalgia nevertheless attached. Alongside its development, especially during the 20th century, the hotel industry was the recurring setting for novels and films. The sum of these cultural representations gives the hotel a special status as a "fiction and fantasy machine," as the author Jean-Jacques Schuhl puts it. Staying at a hotel is accompanied by promises of adventure.
Whether developed as part of an architecture degree, a biennial, a research project or a more conventional commission, the projects gathered for the exhibition "Une chambre ailleurs" are part of this phantasmagoria of the hotel as a place of possibilities far from home, and also show the desire to find new hospitality devices far from known typologies. Through the projects, the exhibition addresses the rituals and spaces produced by and for voluntary travelers, whether they are tourists, workers or walkers.
It shows another domesticity, which does not hesitate to experience forms that everyday life cannot admit.

Publisher: Association Villa Noailles, 2019
Dimensions: 16.4 x 24 cm