TOMORROW HOTEL

Dear reader,

We all hear stories of migrants from conflicted nations from time to time. We hear about the statistics, finances, and the social problems arriving from their migration and so on. What we often don’t hear, however, is the story behind all of that; the difficulty of having to start your life anew; the confusion of having lost your identity; the longing towards something deeply rooted, that is no longer there; the powerlessness towards it all.

When I visited Taiwan for the first time in 2019, I was deeply mesmerized by the sight of the Taiwanese landscape I had been staring at from the car window on the highway; the graves, mountains and the cities that dwelled inside. It somehow strongly reminded me of the stories my parents had told me about Yugoslavia, from before they fled: A place that had everything, where you could safely leave your door unlocked overnight. I started to wonder if Taiwan would be the utopia my parents told me about – what Yugoslavia could have been if it wasn’t for that damn war? Visiting Taiwan for the first time, there was something nostalgic about that.

One year later, as fate would have it, I went back to settle down in Taiwan. As the quarantine measures of the time would oblige, my view would be that of the four walls of my hotelroom. It was a room with no windows, but at least I was fed three times a day. For the duration of two weeks I was not allowed to exit. I was trapped between my place of departure and arrival – like my parents, I found myself within a space of liminality. Ironically, I would would come to traverse Taiwan from hotel to hotel during the course of that year. Documenting my journey, at some point, a hotel became my home. As time passed by, I started to long towards the hotelroom where it all started. Although I was making somewhat of a self-portrait, it appeared to me it was also a story about Taiwan at the same time.

Taiwan, going trough several regime changes past century, is again standing on the equilibrium of forming a new identity. And although identity is something that is strongly sedimented in a society, in political contexts it is often taken at surface value, leaving lots of people estranged, as their old heritage is no longer valid. Reflecting upon this thought, my traveling from hotel to hotel became a metaphor for the liminality of those who traversed regimes came to fall in. What was once ‘home’ became a ‘hotel’ overnight – a temporary residence. A retainer for the next destination, until one can finally return home one day. A fate of being reduced to ‘tourist’ status indefinitely – a mere visitor, yearning to return home.

Having no place to return to, while longing for a ‘utopia’ – the place we feel we belong to. Tomorrow Hotel is about exploring the sentiment towards a recent history that seems to have faded from the surface of the earth. Just like the nostalgic stories of my parents, in Taiwan I listened to stories about different utopias. If you would look at them from the highway, the mountains or cities, they might be invisible. But if you look closer, maybe, on the streets, but surely in peoples homes, you might still see that these old utopias are more than alive.

I wish you a warm welcome,

Dragan Sarić

P.S. I feel, while many have not been been confronted with the threat of migration, with global geopolitical tensions – i.e. Taiwans geopolitical position, unrest in the middle east, a war in the east of Europe etc. – and environmental issues on the rise, it is, sadly, very likely that this fate will be shared by more and more people in the future. With more and more land becoming uninhabitable or threatened by catastrophe, how do we deal with these possible future streams of migration? How do we prepare for the social problems that come from this? In a world that is becoming more and more globally connected, how can we shape a global society that is more inclusive?