Raymond is a project conceived as a homage to the figure of Raymond Roussel with the aim of triggering a series of events, happenings and artworks in the spaces of the Grand Hotel et Des Palmes of Palermo, the place in which the French writer died on July 14, 1933, on the day of the Celebrations for S. Rosalia, patron saint of the city.
Visionary writer, mesmerizing dandy, radical traveller, eccentric President of the Republic of Dreams, Roussel was among the most powerful innovators of the last century.
Raymond is an exhibition project developed considering the spaces, rhythms and metabolism of the Grand Hotel et Des Palmes. It is not a simple exhibition space but an enclosed world, a place for listening and living, a heterotopy, a multi-storied space made of a thousand levels. The hotel room is intended as a floating space, a place with a life its own, a body that is self-defined and self-contained. The project plays within the limits and features of the hotel’s life by drawing a non-linear but labyrinthine itinerary, spreading its own traces, details and performances, writing a story of appearances and ghosts inside the hotel’s most complex and greatest history.
Raymond brings together international authors from different disciplines, backgrounds, attitudes and wisdom.
Raymond is realised in partnership with Grand Hotel et Des Palmes, Museo Civico di Castelbuono (PA), with the support of Marsèll, Humboldt Books, Fiasconaro, Casa della Vigna, in collaboration with Atmosphere by Giovanni Brancato, Saponi&Saponi, Casa Museo del Sapone, Planeta.
Raymond is part of Manifesta 12 Palermo Collateral Events.
