Jack's Hotel
19 avenue Stephen Pichon, Paris
2024-2025
Chambre 205

This is Jack’s Hotel on 19 Ave. Stephen Pichon, where Jean Genet died in spring of 1986. He spent his last days here working on ‘Un captif amoureux’ (Prisoner of Love).
The book is primarily about Genet’s two years spent in the Palestinian refugee camps in 1970-71. It is shaped as a series of images of tragedies, massacres, courage and its loss but above all else: images of the Palestinian people, with whom Genet spent these years and with whom he fell entirely in love. He channels this love through themes that had always informed his work: the beauty of the outlaw, wilful overturning of the established order, the transfiguration of eroticism into chastity, the power of a nonreligious spiritual life, the weightlessness of death, the continuation of a feeling beyond the life of the individual who felt it, and the evasive relationship between the image and its reality.

By the time of him commencing the book in 1983, most of the people he encountered during his time in the camps — his friends and their defenders— were murdered. He spent his last spring, terminally ill himself, in Jack’s Hotel, finalising the book. In the last months he refused painkillers in order to retain lucidity. Some of his complex notes were composed of texts arranged in the form of squares on a chessboard, with an interplay between red and black ink. Consequently, the story unfolds on many levels, in various time periods and stretches into the future.

Genet lived in a tiny single room, facing North. He died there on April 15, by accidently falling and hitting his head. The final manuscripts were not found and remain as a translucent memory kept in the walls of his single room.

Jean Genet’s single room nr 205 is my current studio base.

In November 2024 these were the treasures of the night: burnt leather, engraving on glass and shoes, two-channel video, mixtape, paper on glass, ceramics, ink drawings on skin and found books.