8

The reception desk of hotels or office buildings is the new visitor’s initial encounter with the unfamiliar place he has arrived at, whether he just landed in a new country or in a bureaucratic world. It is his first contact with the rules of the place and the manner in which it is conducted. At the reception desk he registers, admitted, enters, receives instructions, recommendations, restrictions and goes through the necessary procedures for his stay. “8” examines the tenuous moment of arriving at a new place, entering a microcosm that has its own system of laws and the role of the receptionist as a representative and mediator of a separate and closed world. The work creates a portal into a fictional world – a hotel, an office, a waiting room, or perhaps none of these – which some of the visitors may be allowed to enter after passing the reception ritual.