LLOYD
HOTEL
Audio Visual (video with music track)
2′07″
Spring 2006
Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS
The Lloyd Hotel is one of the most legendary buildings in Amsterdam. In April 2006, the Culture Embassy of Amsterdam at Lloyd Hotel and our class’s audio-visual mentor Carolien Scholtes collaborated to assign us a video art project, in which each student created a two minutes video in the theme of “hotel”.
Originally built by the Koninklijke Hollandsche Lloyd (Royal Holland Lloyd) shipping company in 1920, the Lloyd Hotel was used as temporary accommodation for immigrants from Eastern Europe before boarding the company’s South-America Line ships to their destination. Since then the building has gone through the most iconic part of modern European history, as well as the history of Amsterdam, in a most ironic role of “hotel”: Jewish refugees shelter during the Second World War, prison for war criminals right after the war, adult prison, juvenile detention centre, squatted space & artist studios until the extensive restoration that made in into a hotel in 2004.
My idea for the video is to dissolve the building’s iconic history into the Lloyd Hotel’s new distinctive feature of the en-suite lavatory designs. “Hotel” is meant to provide occupants for a specific time a shelter, refreshment and rest, no matter in a good or a bed way, as a middle point for putting one’s past to the rest and preparing for a new departure. It is intimate.
Although the numbers stamped on the hand seem to be room numbers, they are actually the number of occupation days in each period of the building’s history; each wash-up for it’s past as history and a new start for it’s time.