Hotel Diaries: John Smith

Hotel Diaries is an ongoing series of video recordings made in hotel rooms, all of which relate personal experiences to contemporary world events. Works in the series currently include Frozen War (Ireland, 2001), Museum Piece (Germany, 2004), Throwing Stones (Switzerland, 2004), B & B (England, 2005), Pyramids/Skunk (The Netherlands, 2006/7), Dirty Pictures (Palestine, 2007) and Six Years Later (Ireland, 2008). They can be shown individually (apart from Six Years Later) or as a chronological group.

"...These deceptively unassuming works consist of single takes from the point of view of Smith's camcorder as he explores the nocturnal spaces of hotels he is staying in and delivers monologues on his thoughts and observations. At once politically concerned and very funny, these brilliantly structured ramblings connect the observations of his surroundings with the horror of world events in consistently surprising ways."

-- Maximilian Le Cain, Film Ireland Magazine