Leo Zogmayer :
Geras Hotel and Catering School

Since, in the case of the present building, an artistic intervention relating to architecture did not seem to me to be viable, I decided to relate to the purpose of the building (hotel and catering school) from the point of view of content, within the framework of photographic work. During several trips throughout Europe and the Near East some 1,000 b/w photos had accumulated in the course of one year. A selection of 25 motives showed situations related to gastronomy in a variety of different milieus in what seemed to me to be a coherent manner: hospitable gardens in Europe and Asia, stylish metropolitan cafés, museum restaurants, hot-dog stands on the urban periphery, nocturnal blues club scenarios, high-quality middle-class restaurant interiors. Every one of these photographs confronts one with a glimpse into the everyday culture or high-life of the respective place. On the back of a restaurant bill dated 29.5.1991 (Ristorante Ruggero, Bologna) I find my first notes on the project: hospitality – the catering trade; humanism – prostitution; serving –earning; the right to hospitality – the duty to consume; Italy, France, California, Japan, Africa, the Orient, western Austria's globalisation of taste, Adolf Loos invited to Berlin by Bauhaus and his revelations (about architecture) in the course of a two-day lecture on table manners. The eradication by tourism of the old Alpine culture that goes back thousands of years. Clichés of soft tourism, bio-hotels. The universal folklore of the tourist hotel. Travel literature – from the Odyssey to John Murray. The meaningless commentary to be found in restaurant guides about the architecture of hotels and restaurants. Background music, folklore evenings, graffiti of a (not only) education-hungry American in Italy: Marinetti was wrong. Pasta is it!
(Leo Zogmayer)