Dear guest,

Tomorrow Hotel unfolds in a place between longing and belonging. It all started after feeling overly nostalgic from my first sight of Taiwan’s mountains, cities and homes – a sight of what could have been. About a year later, when I came back with a special-entry visa, I further noticed similarities between my long-disbanded home country, and Taiwan. This time, my journey started inside a small Taiwanese quarantine hotel room – a mandatory stay in 2021, before entering the country. 

In this no-window hotel room I started reminiscing about my Yugoslav identity; the ‘‘utopia’’ I longed for. We had left Yugoslavia with the intention of going back, but the country fell apart, and we settled elswehere – never arriving home. Settling in the hotel thus felt familiar: like a liminal waiting room – a space in between departure and arrival – where one resides when their identity or homeland is no longer here, nor there. 

In contemporary society, Taiwan faces a similar liminality. Shaped by Japanese colonization and Chinese republican rule, it finds itself in a Confucian confusion – stuck between identities. However, if a hotel can embody permanence like home, and home can become a place of transience like a hotel: what does this mean for the identities we carry, and the utopias we long for in our deepest fantasies? 

Just like with our homes and identities, when we lose something, we cling to anything that might preserve our memory. Letting go of that, means losing our memory, and thus what we’d wish to preserve. In this process, memory becomes hauntological: because the past keeps coming back, the future is lost.

In Tomorrow Hotel, we encounter a world that is moving on, but at the same time, haunted by the ghosts of its own past;  A world that is trapped between the sentiment of what once was, and a silent longing for that what could have been – but will never be. As I visited Taiwan again in 2025, it seems that most of the spaces I’ve visited and photographed have transformed or disappeared completely; yet, their memory lingers. 

It is in embracing our homes, identities and our memories as hauntological, we can see them being both static and transient at the same time. In doing so, Tomorrow Hotel embraces its own liminality, transforming into a space for mourning and reconciliation – a space to reflect, bury, and move on to what lies beyond our deepest (be)longing. 

The hotel, tomorrow, serves as a liminal lodging of a person, or perhaps a people, coming to terms with their past in order to redefine themselves in an ever-changing world. 

I wish you a warm welcome,

Dragan Sarić, 2025