From thestar.com 20-9-2007
A room with a point of view
Artist converts dumpster to a chic hotel room for Nuit Blanche as comment on gentrification
Sep 19, 2007 04:30 AM
Murray Whyte Staff reporter
Staff Reporter
Last fall in Brooklyn, the Toronto artist known as Swintak gave a talk called "The World is My Studio."
Audience members were coaxed to chase after moving cars, sprint through shops and, in one instance, plant their hands in gooey baking while Swintak trotted alongside describing how the world was her studio.
For the next 11 days, Swintak will be holed up in an abandoned building at a municipal waste disposal site in the Toronto portlands infusing a forlorn dumpster with a veneer of luxe.
"A little bit of beige, some white," says Swintak, running a hand along the glassy shellacked inner walls of her eventually posh receptacle.
When it's done, a suite of rosewood furniture, multiple-hundred thread count sheets and a two-item room-service menu will give the outsize garbage can a sheen of the luxurious.
The notion? A boutique hotel for one night only in an alley behind a Burger King at College St. and Spadina Ave. The installation is part of Nuit Blanche, Toronto's freshly adopted, all-night chaotic art spectacle on Sept. 29 from 7:03 p.m. to sunrise. It turns one this year. Even that wasn't meant to be. Conceived as a one-take shot shot-in-the-arm courtesy of the city's creative communities, public response was so overwhelming – 425,000 braved a rainy night, all night, for the first one – that the city committed to make it an annual thing.
"We didn't know how people would react to it," said Jaye Robinson, the city's director of events. "But when it was over, all the calls, the emails, we had to seriously think about doing it every year."
Easier said than done. Scotiabank, the event's main sponsor last year, hadn't planned its cash outlay – around $300,000, or 30 per cent of the event's total budget – to be an annual expense.
The city started negotiating with the bank in February; it secured sponsorship in the spring. The event had bad timing, the same weekend as a Scotiabank-sponsored Waterfront Marathon.
"We had to take into account it was a big weekend for us," said the bank's vice-president of marketing, John Doig. "If we get into something this big, we want to do it right. It's not just writing a cheque."
That's something the city knows well enough. Nuit Blanche takes a lot of cheques. From 195 individual art projects spread across three zones – bigger, broader and more inclusive than last year – it's the cultural equivalent of herding cats. To that end, the TTC is running shuttle services between zones and opening an all-night run for portions of the subway system.
The cost in cash, time and simple sweat equity is large indeed. If the city hadn't been able to secure funding from Scotiabank, year two would have been near-impossible.
Between Nuit Blanche and Luminato – the other all-encompassing arts festival in town – the strain on creative communities to perform can be great. Privately, many grumbled that the small stipends they received didn't cover the costs of the projects they executed at the city's behest.
The ephemeral nature of the evening caused a disconnect between urban culture at its grassroots and the city administration. Some wondered what such an event – mounds of garbage and hangovers notwithstanding – would leave behind to help foster the culture they had laboured to create.
"That's the Paris model – you never, ever repeat. It's always new," Robinson said. "You have 12 hours to see the art, and if you can't stay up you miss it."
Others see the event as essential branding for a city striving to become known as an international cultural destination.
This year, there will be a spare bed for cultural tourists behind the Burger King at Spadina and College – albeit at 10-minute intervals.
"I think that's a good amount of time," Swintak says, arranging buttons on a rolling spa bed she's building. "You can't have a boutique hotel without a spa," she says, indicating a hollow, cranium-sized notch at the dumpster's one end.
"It's kind of a new concept we're calling a head spa," she says, explaining that guests will wheel into the notch head first for their treatment.
The "treatment," of course, is of a city's upward spiralling economy and thirst for luxury in previously downtrodden urban corners. "Really, what I'm doing is gentrifying the dumpster," Swintak says.