A writer, photographer, and artist originally from New York, Kurt Hollander has been living in Mexico City since For the last three years he has divided his time between Mexico City and Cali, Colombia. His writing and photographs have been featured most recently in The Guardian , Vice , Guernica , Domus , Uncube , Weapons of Reason and elsewhere, and his photography and installations have been exhibited in solo and group shows in the US, Mexico, and Colombia.
He was the editor of Poliester , a contemporary art magazine of the Americas, from to Most people who go to Motel Kiss Me are accompanied by a lover and stay only a couple of hours. I stayed there for two weeks all by myself. The first room created in Kiss Me was the Polar Room. With a bed inside an igloo and icicles hanging down from the ceiling, this room represents a fantasy escape from the sweltering heat of the city because of its popularity, a whole wing of the hotel is now dedicated to such rooms.
Most rooms in the hotel, however, represent countries, including Germany complete with a wall paintings of Hitler and a VW bug , Argentina soccer players and tango singers , France the Eiffel Tower , Spain with a bed inside of a bullfight ring , Venezuela life-sized figures of Fidel and Chavez standing arm-in-arm in front of oil fields , Iraq Saddam Hussein, and more oil fields , and the USA life-sized sculptures of George Bush and Osama Bin-Laden playing chess in front of the World Trade Center towers engulfed in flames.
While I was there taking photographs of the hotel, I rode up and down in the elevator with arriving and departing couples and walked down the halls listening to the music, moans, and screams of people having sex at all hours of the day and night. I often photographed the rooms just after they were abandoned by lovers, with the physical remains of wild sex still to be seen on the bed or floor and the aroma of sex lingering in the air.
Although love hotels are a relatively new phenomenon in the Americas, my stay in Kiss Me showed me just how much these establishments are the continuation of a very intimate relationship between sex, art, and architecture that stretches back thousands of years. Tools manufactured by Homo sapiens during the Paleolithic age not only helped man to survive but were also used to create the first works of art.
