Alex Urso presents the final stage of his project GRAND HOTEL EUROPA, with a residency at Unfinished Art Space in Malta, and an exhibition at Studio 87 in Valletta.

Through drawing, collage and installation, GRAND HOTEL EUROPA reflects on the political and humanitarian crises that the EU has experienced in recent years. Each series of works included in the project explores the rise of nationalistic feelings from different perspectives and philosophies, with a particular focus on the migrant flows through and around Europe. Urso’s visit to Malta will follow the first two chapters of the project, which have already taken place in Belgrade, Serbia and in Ustka on the Baltic Coast. The project takes its name from a large hotel, the Hotel Europa on the Adriatic coast – a childhood memory of Urso’s, representing a stability and unity in Europe, currently threatened by populism and far-right beliefs.

What strikes me about this body of work is that so much of its imagery is based on absence. The absence of facial features in the faceless politician, the absence of the wearer of the man’s jacket, and the absence of the hotel on top of a hill. What is it that makes these politicians featureless? They are not merely symbolic figures – some of them are clearly recognisable despite their facelessness. Is it their lack of feeling or empathy that denies them their visage? There is an element of menace in their anonymity; devoid of a face, they are also without humanity or responsibility. The image of the hotel – or rather the image of its absence – is not without its own symbolism. These images lead us to reflect on what we have lost - the qualities that Europe once stood for or attempted to achieve; like stability, safety, and even elegance. Nostalgia is perhaps not always constructive (on a grand scale it can even be dangerous), but the hotel’s absence – and its temporary reappearance within this exhibition – contains an element of melancholy that allows a quiet reflection on the space it leaves behind. This last stage of GRAND HOTEL EUROPA is timely too, in the context of Britain’s imminent departure from the European Union. Practical questions about Europe’s borders may be answered in time, but the symbolic absence – the blank space on the map – will remain. And finally, let’s not forget the image of Europe from beyond its borders. It may be disingenuous to claim that Europe has shape-shifted from a welcoming hotel to a guarded fortress, because, was it ever really as welcoming as we may like to think? So the absence in this case, may not be a disappearance of something that once existed, but a perceived absence in an imagined memory. Postcards from incarnations of the Grand Hotel Europa all over the world give a sense that at one time, Europe, and its name, was a source of pride. And while the colonial implications of this, should not be ignored, the postcards from hotels that probably no longer exist reinforce the idea of a Europe that is no longer what it was.

Alex Urso describes his memories of the Grand Hotel Europa “When I was young, during summer I used to go to the sea with my sister and my father. Every Saturday morning, we would take the car, going down the hills to reach our spot on the Adriatic coast. Here, right behind us, a big hotel was standing - the Hotel Europa. Elegant and magnificent, the Hotel Europa was one of the most iconic places of the area. The name “Europa”, indeed, was a quite common thing during the 90s: sports fields, urban parks and conference palaces had the name of the old continent. Indeed, the qualities recalled by it, were many and all positive: strength, stability, safety. Twenty years later many of these structures do not exist anymore. The name Europe, for its part, does not seem so popular or appealing anymore as before…”.

His description has a sweetness to it – children on an outing with their father, visiting a familiar spot on the coast. But it’s a bitter-sweet tale, because the Hotel Europa, like many well-known hotels here in Malta, is no longer in business; the Jerma Palace Hotel, or the White Rocks Complex are long abandoned, left bare to the elements. Likewise, the values that were claimed by Europe during the second half of the last century, have dissipated, leaving a sense of instability in their wake. The world has changed since the dichotomic - and perhaps simpler – outlook of Cold War times; the black and white of friend-or-foe is no longer clear. The hotel of holidays long past, like the stability of a Europe in flux, is consigned to distant memory.

Presented here in an antique German language edition, The World of Yesterday is a romantic homage to Europe by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. Although he wrote it during the Nazi persecutions in the 1930s, it was not published until after his suicide in 1942. The memoir talks about a forgotten world, before and after the First World War Remembering the past, Zweig talks about his travels, meetings with intellectual personalities of his time (such as Rilke, Freud, Benedetto Croce), describing a pacific and prosperous epoch that is brutally destroyed first by the so-called Great War, and later by the rise of the Nazi movement. Zweig shares his memories and his concern about the future, hoping for Europe not to fall into the same traps of the past.