Hotel Yeoville takes what materialised as an online project and translates it into print. In doing so the book stands at the threshold of new and traditional media, testing the boundaries of both.
Hotel Yeoville was a participatory public art project, conceptualised and directed by artist Terry Kurgan. It was based online and in the public library of the old suburb of Yeoville on the eastern edge of Johannesburg’s inner city. Kurgan developed the project in collaboration with a diverse group of people working across a range of disciplines. It comprised a website (www.hotelyeoville.co.za), a photo wall and a series of booths in which members of the public were invited to offer stories about themselves through mapping, video, photography and text, using various digital interfaces and social media applications.
Over the course of a year, Hotel Yeoville came to represent an extraordinarily intimate and multi-layered document of a segment of this diverse community, most of whom are immigrants from all across the African continent. The project engaged with and confronted assumptions about representation and its relationship to citizenship, truth, knowledge and power. Its stories are a small but unusual record of the complexities of everyday life in a rapidly evolving city.
This collection of essays, photographs and other texts represents and extends what began as an interactive art project and evolved into a multiplatform archive of urban life. The book presents new critical perspectives on contemporary artistic research and practice, and is a remarkable documentation of the complex set of negotiations – between artists, residents, consultants and audience – that brought the work into being.
Hotel Yeoville includes essays and contributions by Aida Sánchez de Serdio, Alexander Opper, Alexandra Dodd, Caroline Wanjiku Kihato, Godfrey Tshis Talabulu, Jason Hobbs, John Spiropoulos, Justice Malala, Tegan Bristow, Terry Kurgan and Zen Marie.
The book will be launched in Cape Town at Clarkes Bookshop on 16 May with a panel discussion between Terry Kurgan, Alex Dodd and Oliver Barstow during which they will explore their respective roles as artist, writer and publisher/book designer.
Published by Fourthwall Books
