MARISOL MONTIEL

Lo que se queda en la habitación (What is left in the room) | Intervention in the Hotel República | Historic Center, Mexico City | April 6th, 2011

Four rooms were intervened with pieces that crystallized moments of a love relationship. The first room seems to be full of irreplaceable instants, all of it covered of moments that rest in the shape of flesh- colored rose petals. The sensuality of the petals as pieces of skin, the bed and the floor invite to touch. Who enters must do it barefoot, must be able to feel the softness. The size of the bedroom only let you lay on the bed watching on tv how a dress made of petals gets dried. The second room is inaccessible. The hands that cover my body, your hands that cover my body take the shape of address that  can be seen on the balcony of the room. In this moment there is nobody else inside, the door is locked.

The third one is the room of passions. The guts, the flesh that gets rotten. Death. The skins that are left on the bed, when the body is abandoned. The bed covered with red sheets, the skin of a skinned person lying next to two hearts disposed over a white blanket. A low light coming from the small night lamp. A love song can be heard.

The last one is the room of absences. The shells of two of my ex-lovers lay empty and dry on two beds in the same room. White bodies over white sheets. A television that only shows static, a broken and stopped clock beside the beds.

In the middle of the evening, all the guests were reunited in the lobby. A table full of glasses with red wine was waiting for them. Two female tango teachers were invited to give a lesson for those who assisted to the hotel. Each had been asked previously to write a text that described what tango is, without any technical explanation, only subjectivity. These texts were read to everyone. What they read could have talked about a passion relationship more than about a simple dance, or… is eroticism a kind of dance? While they were speaking animal shaped masks were put on the floor. Then the dancers –to-become were invited to choose the mask they liked, put it on and take their partner. The class was about learning how to walk together, learning to hold each other. The couples would walk in circle, little by little suffocated due to the heat caused by the mask they were wearing on their faces, but without stop moving. And this was how the hotel ended up full of birds, panthers, monkeys, camels, sharks and one or other distracted sheep dancing with a wolf.