Jaana Kristiina Alakoski

HOTEL SELECTION
8 January 2022

Welcome to the place you have always imagined and the things you did not know that you wanted, presented to you within reach for the first time ever.

For the participatory artwork and performance called Hotel Selection, you can use the word hotel as a guide in your search for the work’s imaginative nucleus. In other words, Hotel Selection invites you in-to and mobilises the phenomenal baggage of a hotel room. The room, the performer and the performance want you, viewer, to encounter all components in a mode of dreaming. Swaddled by the fluffy duvet, freedom of choice, you enter.

The room, the performer and the performance then calls on your active decision making. By your participation we create an extimate (simultaneously external and intimate) projection surface for your future. Hotel Selection calls you as a grower, a thinker and a maker of excellence, to dream and to participate. Together we think: Impossible is only an opinion. We go the distance and we notice: The extra mile is never crowded – the pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity, the optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty.

‘The phenomenal baggage of a hotel room’ is found in things such as; the feeling of a premade bed, of breakfast served in the morning, of a white bathrobe and a mini bar, or a mini body lotion tube stuffed in a suitcase. It resides in thick curtains and someone else’s cleaning. When viewed from a position of economic precarity, these phenomena cater to a fantasy of what a different life could be, hopes and dreams inhabiting the concept of luxury or a room one can only work or buy one’s way into.

Of significance for this performance is above described restriction of access, but also the position of the hotel room as outside of the everyday life continuum. By the latter I mean that the hotel room is a place we go away to, where we break, leaving life to the side for a moment. Through this air-pocketed temporality, the conditions of the hotel room resemble the conditions that are present in pretence or in play – a step outside of normality. Participating in the work, viewer, you will not only come to meet me, but could also come to see pretence in your everyday life – the continuum you leave behind as the work is entered.

Yours graciously
Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski

This is the first pilot performance in a new Celsius Projects performance series entitled ‘Proximity by Proxy’. The last few years have forced us all to reconsider and question our boundaries and the places of contact with others that surround us, we have lost a closeness to many friends and family as well as activities and rituals that used to make up our everyday life. This precarity of our proximity to one another, the spaces we used to occupy and the shapes of the gaps between us have been thrown into constant questioning and re-evaluation. Human closeness is now subject to a series of rules that act as constraints upon the performance of everyday life, these constraints oftentimes appear to mirror the precarity we feel in many other areas of modern life. We are forced to create new methods of being together, new modes of interacting and performing everyday life, we have to build new rituals to live our lives by proxy; through an alternate approximate version of ourselves. So what better medium to decode the new rules of the game (the serious game of society, governance and normalcy) and present a new set of constraints than performance? ‘Proximity by Proxy’ is a loose theme under which Celsius Projects invites Performance artists in 2022 to work with performance once again whilst also following all recommendations and constraints to our proximity and conduct these performances by proxy if necessary…

Celsius Projects proudly invites you to the premiere of Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski’s new performance work ‘HOTEL SELECTION’ that will be open for one day only on Saturday the 8th of January 2022. Jaana is an artist born in Malmö and raised in Stockholm, Sweden. She studied at Central Saint Martins in London, where she received a Bachelors in Fine Art, and is currently temporarily based in Malmö

With support from: