At this year's IAM Weekend, you introduced your concept for the Abuelos hotel. Can you tell me more about the project?
The idea for Abuelos was to create a physical space where artists can have their creative needs met as much as their financial, material and access needs. It is necessary because traditional art spaces – particularly those aimed at minority groups – tend to lose out when government funding changes.
While there are rooms, food and drink as in most hotels, Abuelos is primarily a sight of imagination. It’s rooted in the spirit of our grandparents’ homes; the grandparents who mobilised through strenuous and oppressive times in the 1950s and 1960s. Even at the tail end of the Windrush era, when Caribbean migrants were facing all sorts of systemic challenges, they were still centred on joy every day.
Safe spaces have largely taken the form of art, wellbeing and nightlife venues. Why, in your view, is the hotel an ideal space for social freedom?
Hotels should be sites for imagination, if not only for the amazing amalgamation of people who would never ordinarily share space together. Whenever I work in another city, I want to feel the energy of that city, and often you don’t get that from commercial hotels. They feel detached from a sense of place. With Abuelos, we considered how we could represent our spirit in physical form, and through all the different types of connections that are manifest here.
What kind of hotel services could you envisage sparking these human connections?
In one of the co-designing hackathons we held on imagining Abuelos last year, we talked about the idea of having no corners; that access is a design tool as well as being about creating spaciousness. There are some people who just want it to have a music studio, for example, or a dance studio. I want there to be various multi-functional rooms with different types of activities. We've also been prototyping the idea of having artists-in-residence who transform the bedrooms, so they become these sleeping immersive installations. For us, it’s crucial that the space is determined by the people who are going to use it, not just in this lifetime, but in future generations. We’re considering, for example, how children might be the designers of this infrastructure as well.
