Life is a Dream
2003
‘life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams’
Calderon de la Barca, Life is a dream
I have stayed in a great many hotel rooms. They are, almost without exception, the same room.
Not identical in their details, but identical in their logic: a domestic interior from which everything domestic has been removed. Bed, bathroom, surfaces, light. The architecture of home without any of its content. A home accumulates, holds the traces of the people who live in it over time. A hotel room is designed to resist that process. It is cleaned, reset, returned to its original condition after every occupant. Its function is amnesia.
And yet I keep finding myself in them, thinking more clearly than I think at home.
The emptiness of the hotel room is not absence. It is the specific condition of a space that offers no resistance to the interior life. At home the accumulated objects press back. The hotel room offers a surface with nothing behind it, and the mind fills it with whatever it is carrying: what has been left behind, what is being travelled toward, what cannot be thought in the presence of ordinary life.
Bachelard wrote that immensity is within ourselves, communicated not by vast landscapes but by reflective daydream in intimate spaces. The hotel room is the architectural perfection of that condition.
What I photographed in these rooms is not the view. It is the room itself. The bed, the lights, the television carrying channels in five languages, the Bible in the drawer, the remote control. The window I have turned my back on to photograph the space the window was supposed to make bearable. The room is sold on what it overlooks. These photographs refuse that transaction.
Calderón's Segismundo cannot determine which of his states is real and which is dreamed because the two are made of the same material. The hotel room produces a version of that condition. You arrive, you sleep, you leave. The room was the same before you came and will be the same the morning after you go. Your presence in it leaves no trace.
This is the dream. The dreamer passes through. The room remains.
