Checking in to Hotel Yeoville

Abstract

This article explores a groundbreaking public art project, Hotel Yeoville, which keys into a diversity of immigrant and South African experiences through the medium of customized digital interfaces. The authors begin with an analysis of a series of contemporary South African artistic and literary representations of alienation, foreignness, xenophobia, migrancy and otherness. Dodd situates works such as Rian Malan's collection of essays Resident Alien and Neill Blomkamp's science fiction blockbuster film District 9 in relation to the xenophobic attacks that swept through South Africa in May 2008. Kurgan goes on to reflect on the making of Hotel Yeoville. Developed in collaboration with a hybrid mix of professionals from across the African continent and the globe, the project was installed in the public library of the pan-African suburb of Yeoville – home to 40,000 people, seventy per cent of whom are forced migrants from the rest of the African continent. In conclusion, the two authors engage with issues of authorship and subjectivity that have informed this virtual and visual intervention, seeking to ‘establish bonds of care across boundaries of inequality and exclusion, ideologies and religions, politics and power, nations and geography’.