Hotel in Modica

Exteriors

Unlike the background it has emerged from, this hotel in the countryside of Modica is one of a kind. The city is world renowned for its baroque monuments. However, this hotel has been conceived by young artists honouring the avantgarde who long before had taken part of futurism as cultural rebirth.
This hotel in Modica is one among the few others that have launched their artistic endeavour of creating places where space provides pleasure more than only relaxation.

This hotel does not provide guests with the picture-postcard image of Modica. It is resembles a street market or square peopled by buskers and sellers of pirated software subverting the established order.
It was born to challenge a land of baroque beauty which will never lose its magnificence but which was given a different touch by young artists who decided to bring back futurism and the avant-garde movement providing the city with a place for difference, where each space is created as a unique piece of expression.
At the beginning of 20th century futurism obtained something what had not been obtained until then: it became a cultural movement that involved national and international levels. Its manifestations included visual arts, literature, music and cinema, ranging from daily life to worldwide cultural expression.
Continuing changes, artificiality, mutation, rapidity of images, transformation, are but just some nouns which characterize the time we live in. Ephemeral, fleeting, unstable, fast changing, fragmented, transient are adjectives that describe events and spaces of our era. Planning, structure and organization are thought to help overcome fragmentation.
Hotels have not escaped the features institutions, corporations, businesses, clubs and holiday villages and resorts are infused with. The city as well as its suburbs have undergone the same structuralization of our era. The public spaces are but mirrors of these mutations. However, besides the commercial, recreational, fragmented and mutated spaces, there are others. In these other erratic places, creativity, vitality, originality and spontaneity are core and the young meet. Places that  bend the rules are now turned into springs of life. Structuralization and planning are not the way to heal fragmentation. An effective remedy is spontaneity and transients arts by using public spaces.

This hotel in Modica is an example of this new dynamics of life with a destructuring solution to organization, structure and plan.
The hotel in Modica is the result of joint work between its designer and architect and the Accademia di Belle Arti of Catania. To create fixed pieces-settings of art,  young students and graduate artists entered a competitions held at the Accademia in Catania. These artists did not create solo but as middleman communicating with different generations, guests and other artists.. Guests are called to participate by living in and living the piece itself.

Among the services guests at this hotel in Modica can enjoy are laundry, washing machine and breakfast served in the room. Pets or animals such as cats, dogs or horses will find accommodation in the greenery.
The hotel affords a garden, parking space and access for the disabled.

Interiors

Spaces, furnishings, colours, textures have helped a new interpretation of art to come true and concrete. The hotel offers rooms and suites accommodating from 2 to 4 guests.

The hotel’s reception area warmly receives guests. The names of Sicilian writers, poets, playwrights and artists deserving recognition are written on its red walls to honour them. From the reception area a passage way leads to the rooms. A panel is placed in front of each door. They are reproduced parole in libertà  “Words in freedom” of writers, who, from 1915 to 1925, supported and adopted Marinettian futurism as their way of expressing art. These “Words in freedom” aim to announce what comes behind each door. They open, close, communicate, separate and bind futurism and “futurability”.

The living area is where creative, subversive and combined breakfast is served to guests. Culture permeates this room, a video of a and let those authors communicate with other generations: a passage of Italo Calvino’s American lectures, a map of the globe displayed backwards, artistically shaped armchairs around round tables, and tables and chairs under a roof that lets air and light come in.

The word “Non-place” was much heard when the hotel was described. However, this hotel in Modica has gained recognition. Here, rooms without a touch of their own, without a personal hallmark do not exist. Instead, there are spaces of personal creation produced by skilled bright artists and architects.

This hotel in Modica is a journey  back and forth, past and future, to link the artists of 20th century and guests. This journey embraces both and analyzes past from the perspective of young artists.