Pictorialization of Paris

Hang on to your beret my Francophile friends and welcome to
Hotel Everland
A project by the artist-duo L/B - Sabing Lang (born 1972 in Bern), Daniel Baumann (born 1967 in San Francisco). Their biography literally is pages of art installations and projects that have been mapped all over the world.

Everland is a Hotel with only one room including a bathroom, a king-size bed and a lounge. The bouneous dimensioned room represents the subjective dream of a hotel: the architecture, the playful details, as well as the request to steal the golden embroidered bath towels. Basically all Everland guests were partaking in the project.

Also the concept for operating the hotel was defined by the artists. All facets are important constituents of the artistic idea: The room can be booked for one night only, the mini-bar is fully stocked and included in the price, breakfast is delivered to the door and a record collection stands at ones disposal.

The Tour

Hotel Everland was first developed on invitation of the Curator Gianni Jetzer for the Exhibition concept "Everland" at the Swiss national exhibition in the year 2002. The Hotel was planned by L/B and built in Burgdorf.

It was then transported to Yverdon where it was located on the lake of Neuchatel for 4 months. After the end of Expo 02', the mobile pavilion was brought to Brugdorf and was placed on the factory roof at L/B studio.

From June 2006 until September 2007 the one room hotel was exhibited and run as a Hotel on the roof-deck of the Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig, Germany.

As a last destination Hotel Everland moved to Paris from October 2007 until spring 2009. High above the city, with a view on the Eiffel Tower, it is installed on the roof of Palais de Tokyo. It was also possible to book the room for the night or visit it during the day.

A book about the project is available by Christoph Merian Verlag.

"It's what we thought of as an ideal hotel room," Lang told Reuters as she
watched a giant crane being prepared to winch the prefabricated
green unit up from the back of a truck.

Art {creation meant to communicate or appeal to senses of the mind}

Guests paid 333 euros ($473) a night during the week and 444
euros at weekends, a comparable rate to other hotels in the chic 16th
arrondissement, with charges used to cover running costs.

Julia Schäfer, curator of the GFZK Leipzig where the hotel spent 320 nights, observed the uniqueness of the Everland's guest book and wrote, "More commonly used to gauge the satisfactions of hotel guests, the 'guest book' gives us good ideas of Everland's effect on overnight visitors. Many people left drawings. They drew Everland, they drew themselves on the sofa by the window or the view outside. They tried to find individual forms of expression, tried to be other than 'normal'. They were exclusive and never boring; They felt part of the 'Everland-community'. It sounds almost esoteric-but that's how it reads. You get the impression that the people who were there came out purged. It was like a trip in a space ship - that's how it was perceived".

Bye bye Paris - After 159 nights in Yverdon, 320 nights in Leipzig and finally 557 nights in Paris, the tour of Hotel Everland came to an end. L/B stated that the project was not a prototype. Painful as it is for those of us that never had the excitment of staying in the magnificent hotel/artistic blueprint, there will be no further hotels - "Au Revior"

{go forth & live responsibly}

travel feeds the soul

research credit & photo: smh.com.au; everland.cu;