woman willing to defend her hotel
Hotel Isabel (Zocalo) Mexico City, Mexico, 2003
Performance work and video documentation on DVD

woman willing to defend her hotel is a performance work that took place at Hotel Isabel in Mexico City during the “Voila Quebec Festival”, a Mexican – Canadian Artists Cultural Exchange. I was part of a collective of Canadian artists called “Sonnet Projects” who came to Mexico City in November of 2003. In this highly suggestive environment of a hotel, this intervention became an interactive space concentrating on the points of friction between public and private realms, between individual impulses and established norms. This surrounding merged with character ambiguities and the relationship of one to one’s environment resulting in a new series of self-portraits and the video documentation of this public intervention. This video segment presents an undercover policeman giving a public demonstration on the proper handling of a toy rifle purchased at Walmart......

As I handed out a soft-pliable toy or “look-alike grenades” to a passersby or tourists from the hotel, I advised participants in Spanish that the object and its purpose was “for protection…”.
I had stuffed fake Mexican money in my pockets and army jacket and awarded this out generously to the public security force or/and police in uniform outside the entrance to the hotel (there is a very large security presence felt in Mexico city, especially protecting the streets of the Zocalo, the historic district close to the Presidential Palace and they are dressed in different forms of uniform and stature). Respectively dutiful, I set out to politicize and embody the intimate and immediate in these exchanges of a woman willing to defend her hotel.