Publication Hotel Savoy —alongside the video installation it accompanies—is an attempt to symbolically ‘get inside’ the 1918 novel Hotel Savoy, by the Austrian writer Joseph Roth. It is also an attempt to enter the hotel itself, described by Roth in the book, and filmed by me in the present day: the choice to depict the same place from a distance of a hundred years allowing me to see the parallels between the two realities. The novel is an elegy for a Europe which was disintegrating and aggregating into small nation states, in which the author could no longer find himself; Roth did not see himself as an Austrian Jew, but as a citizen of the multicultural Habsburg Empire stretching from Vienna to the edge of Russia. On his way back from the front of the First World War, Roth stayed at the eponymous hotel in Łódź, my home town, and encountered the flotsam of Europe at its most existential.
Hotel Savoy, 3-channel video installation, 6mins (looping), 2022
Credits: A novel by Joseph Roth, 1918 filmed in and around Hotel Savoy, Łódź – Poland, 2018, directed, filmed and edited by Anna Łuczak, Camera assistance: Ghislain Amar, Sound design: Francesco Cimino,
Support: Daan Milius, Tim Rutten
Hotel Savoy, Reader, Digital print, 200 copies, 2022
Credits: Best Spaetzle in Town: text by Olga Hohmann, Graphic design: Hagen Verleger, proof-reading English: Nick Thomas, proof-reading Polish: Olga Tyszkiewicz
Production coordination: Sophie Bates
Photo documentation: Jakob Forster
Install team: WET and Grace Baggott
Special Thanks: WET members, Grace Baggott, Maciej Łuczak, Maria Łuczak, Jakob Forster, Natalia Amelia Saied, Sophie Schmidt, Joshua Thies, Hagen Verleger, Olga Hohmann, Olga Tyszkiewicz and Andrzej Leder
How to Get from Space to Place is an episodic exhibition program by WET for 2021-22, consisting of five core parts with moving image artists from the Netherlands and abroad. The program focuses on the notion of ‘place’ and what that means in the contemporary moment.
Project made possible with the support of Gemeente Rotterdam, CBK Rotterdam, Stichting Droom en Daad, de Hillevliet, Prins Bernhard Fonds and Mondriaan Fonds