The book:
Art for Hotels is about pain and joy born of human wandering. The word Hotels in the title is not meant literally, but as a symbol of a place where one dwells away from home. This is both an art book and a collection of short stories: the visual and the narrative are juxtapositions, not mirror images; each tells its own story, in its own symbolic language. Thence comes the book's unusual expressive quality.


About the authors:
"Researchers of demographic trends sometimes make a distinction between stayers (people who spend their lives in the place where they were born) and movers (people who leave their hometowns and, temporarily or permanently, settle elsewhere).

We are both movers. Over the past thirty years, between us, we have resided in more than a half-dozen cities and in several countries, although seldom at the same time. Eventually we realized that, while our schedules rarely overlapped, we were both profoundly affected by our migration experiences and that this showed in our creative work. Art for Hotels is a result of this discovery."

-- Relja and Vida Penezic

From "A Woman on the Plane":
"I saw myself as a member of a new kind of nation, a transnation (prefix trans here meaning beyond, over, across), not tied to a geographic location but consisting of people like me, people from more than one place, between countries, in transition, unable or unwilling to attach themselves to any specific ethnic roots or national identity, or perhaps simply too confused to do so; people who had traveled too far in both space and time from their places of origin, so no signifier now referred clearly and unambiguously to what it used to signify. My people."