Hotels are the same the world over. Be it Buenos Aires, Berlin or Teheran, after going through the automatic glass door that separates the lobby from the city you encounter the same functional music, signs in English, and smiling people in uniform... We enter a new country: IBIS-Land, Suite-Hotel-Land, Holiday-Inn-Land...

At reception we request a key to an apartment that will be a substitute for our home.
We spend the night in anonymous rooms where anonymous beings make our beds, clean our baths, change our sheets. Most of them are foreigners. And we too are foreigners in the hands of other foreigners who look after us in our absence.

Who are these ghosts who come into our room when we’re not there? Where do they come from? A war zone, an economic crisis, a suburb? What have they experienced, what do they know about other people’s lives? How many naked bodies, flooded bathrooms, dishevelled beds, sleeping people, strange clothes and smells do they encounter in the course of one day?

“Hotel Maids” is an installation composed of biographies. Each visitor adopts the role of a chambermaid responsible for five rooms per hour. But instead of cleaning, the audience spends the hour walking through the five rooms, where they discover portraits of the cleaning staff: films, original voice recordings and photographs that bring to light something of the invisible spirits who clean up after others.

Lola Arias, Buenos Aires

Lola Arias (1976)  (b. 1976) is a writer, director, actress and musician. She founded the interdisciplinary artists’ collective Postnuclear, with which she develops theatre, literature, music and art projects. Her productions play with the overlap zones between reality and fiction. Centre stage in “Striptease” is occupied by a baby, while its parents fight out a duel by telephone. In “El amor es un francotirador”, the performers relate true and fictional love stories while a rock band plays live. In “Mi vida después”, six actors reconstruct their parents’ youth in 1970’s Argentina by means of photos, letters, cassettes and old clothes.
Arias works with actors, non-actors, musicians, dancers, children, babies, and animals. Her most recent projects with Stefan Kaegi, with whom she began collaborating in 2006, were “SOKO São Paulo” involving Brazilian police officers, and “Airport Kids” featuring global nomads aged between 7 and 13.
She most recently staged “Familienbande” at Kammerspiele, Munich, and “That Enemy Within” at HAU, Berlin. Her texts for the theatre have been translated into German, English and French, and published in Verlag der Autoren in Germany. Blumenbar Verlag will publish her book Liebe ist ein Heckenschütze in 2010.
Lola Arias’ works for theatre have been performed at festivals including Steirischer Herbst, Graz; Festival d’Avignon; In Transit Festival, Berlin; We are here, Dublin; Spielar Festival, Munich; Alkantara Festival, Lisbon; Radicals Festival, Barcelona.
Together with Ulises Conti, she composes and plays music, and in 2006 released a CD with the title El amor es un francotirador (Metamúsica).

www.lolaarias.com.ar