Gridiron Hotel

Intent of the project BAROQ at the GRIDIRON HOTEL: As a setting for the production of contemporary art:
the project strives to cultivate a hotel organisational structure (self-reflexive spectacle) as a workshop based program in the context of production aesthetics. By creating critical and temporary situations (temporal interval sessions), BAROQ at the Gridiron Hotel wants to offer its guests and the invited participants to the project (Institutions and process constructors) a basic architecture (stage set) that serves as a base for communication and appearance of their individual interventions. Incessantly, the central hotel departments will develop, gaining enduring outcome through these interventions in dialog with alternate partners (guests). Through the investigation of different forms of presentation and dialog, BAROQ will thus try to define the role of artistic research anew. This means that the project is its own premise.

In the context of this project, the meaning of the word hotel has several layers. First and foremost, it is a metaphor for explicit organisational and labour structures. The focus lays on the merger of four chosen research fields (layers): a hotel as a theatrical setting for the public/private society, its resource (work, learning and sustainable development) deployment, constructing an inventive model for the hotelier business and appropriating its organisational structure for the production of contemporary art.

The theme that runs through the whole project is to develop a hotel structure for the production, presentation and dissemination of contemporary art. - although the entire project is set in time rather than place. As a performative research project, the Gridiron hotel is set up as a three year extensive development construct with an open aggregate of sessions or scenes - as in work, perform, pretend, proceed, operate or accomplish -, setting the coordinates and relational scenery for the creation of the aimed for development plan or storyboard. The group of independent and interdisciplinary participants will deconstruct and appropriate the structure of a random hotel organisation in order to analyse the use value of this business model for the production, presentation and dissemination of art. The hotel is thus seen as a metaphor for the production of contemporary art which will culminate in a narrative proposal in retrospection and thus introducing a new model of critique in current artistic and institutional practice.

Yours faithfully,
Joel Verwimp, Artistic director