In his notebook, Mario Garcia Torres invites the reader to share in his thoughts on the relation between being a guest and being a host. What kind of reactions are provoked when one gets an invitation? How does one act within a given context, and how can this context be escaped? How can the functions of guest and host be interchanged? Garcia Torres centers his essay on these questions, employing examples provided by other artists who have explicitly put themselves in one of these two roles: as hosts, Alighieri Boetti with his One Hotel in Kabul and Allen Ruppersberg with Al’s Grand Hotel in Los Angeles; as guests, Daniel Buren in the Virgin Islands, where he installed in situ works, residing on Saint Croix in a resort that was destroyed in 1989 by a hurricane, and Martin Kippenberger, who lived in the Hotel Chelsea in Cologne. We are Garcia Torres’s guests and must decide what to bring along: a bottle of wine or a bouquet of flowers.

Mario Garcia Torres (*1975) is an artist living in Mexico City.

Language: German/English