The emblematic and elegant hotel, today more active than ever.
With the presence of writers such as Camila Sosa Villada, cinema on the beach on full moon nights, the return of the innovative book project I’ll call you Friday -which this year will include a sort of seaside fair-, an artistic workshop to build machines for looking and displays such as the photographic PH15an artistic collective of social integration that this summer exhibits by cartoonists such as Liniers, returns to the cultural cycle that is already a summer classic at the Old Hotel Ostende (VHO).
“To coincide is an action and in its infinitive, a power” is the name of the cycle co-created with Fundación Medifé that this season will take over the spa and interiors of the old hotel which in 2023 will celebrate 90 years of history. Born in 1913, before Pinamar and Villa Gesell, when that point of the Atlantic seemed more like a wild wasteland of wind and dunes than a rest center for Buenos Aires and Buenos Aires closer than Mar del Plata.
In its etymology, that word has three themes that interest both Roxana Salpeter, head of the VHO, and the people of Medifé, for this summer experience: “‘with’, names how important it is to be with ‘others’, ‘ in’ refers to an interior, a certain reflexivity, and ‘cadere’, to fall”. Something like “dropping in this summer, take advantage of the less busy time to turn inward and listen to usapproach some beautiful experience and think that there is a point -always- in which some coincidence can be found”.
Details of period architecture continue to move those who arrive.
But also “celebrate the discovery”, they point out those coincidences that will lead Juan Mattio, for example, to be interviewed before his own readers and others in the spa garden of the Old Hotel -on February 9 at 6:00 p.m., Garay and Rambla Sud – about that beautiful and tremendous book about madness and the word, or about a mother and a son, which was “Materiales para una nightmare”, Filba-Medifé Award 2022. Or the preview that Julián López will make of a novelty, his new novel “The infinitesimal forest”, on the 20th at 6 pm in the same place.
These are “times that require a lot from everyone” and “we understand that there may be friendlier and more challenging ways to be together,” a common space for the will to enjoy and achieve some well-being“, they explain about those days that, always as an open and free invitation, and as far as literary visits are concerned, always on the beach as well, will open at sunset on January 21 (7:30 p.m.), with a public reading by Camila Sosa Villada in front of the seafrom fragments of his books “Las malas”, “Sandro’s girlfriend” and “I’m a fool for loving you”.
There will be no shortage of music in January and it will arrive by the hand of Daniela Horovitz with the presentation of Illuminated Beauties, on January 11 at 7:30 p.m. in the hotel’s spa garden, where the singer-songwriter will take an intimate and poetic journey through her songs .
The spaces, even recycled, retain the aura of magical times.
“This is the true return to face-to-face – says Roxana Salpeter, manager of the historic hotel through which writers such as Silvina Ocampo and Adolfo Bioy Casares – told Télam, 2022 was a complicated season due to its intricacies, there was face-to-face but with the gust of Covid, which we survived, but protocols and reverses had to be adjusted on the fly. In the hotel’s microclimate it went well, but it was a real stress; like living two seasons in one. Well, 2023 will be something else,” he promises.
In this sense, it stands out: “Here we are very excited about this new season, which has already started on December 16.those who spent Christmas are already leaving and those who will be in New Year and those who will spend their summer began to arrive. The main coincidence between the organizers of this 2023 cycle is in the ways of looking at the world and these free public activities are our small contribution”.
The grid starts with a sweet and expected return. That first exhibition that in 2016 showed in the hotel rooms photos taken by boys from 10 to 20 years old from Ciudad Ocultaone of the most populous shantytowns in the country, within the framework of the PH15 Foundation workshop and reinterpreted by cartoonists such as Liniers or Vero Gatti, returns with the third leg provided by the editor Silvia Gruppo when she added texts to those recreations of writers such as Marina Mariasch, Pía Bouzas and Ana Ojeda or Mariano Quirós.
A public reading by Camila Sosa Villada in front of the sea will be part of the programming.
If before there were more than 12 diptychs called “Great illustrators, little photographers”, now there are more than 12 triptychs entitled “Three stories in one click”, part 2because another part of those triptychs had already arrived at the hotel in 2019.
Ph15 is a space where children and adolescents learn to look at what surrounds them and what they carry inside to express who they are and what they feel through images built with light and shadow.. Ph means photography, which in turn means drawing with light, and 15 is the number that identifies the town, where the photographers are from, where the workshop created 22 years ago in the middle of the sociopolitical crisis of 2001 ended up, with the idea of find beauty and generate a tool for social inclusion, if not to work from photography, to learn new ways of looking and thinking, starting at home.
“The biggest challenge now is subsistence, returning with the annual workshops canceled in the pandemic and continuing with projects such as Visual Translator that this year will take us to Bariloche to work with Mapuche children,” says Moira Rubio Brennan, co-director, along with Miriam Priotti, of the foundation with which you can collaborate through its website and that since its creation has worked in more than 200 neighborhoods and communities from Ushuaia to La Quiaca, with more than 3,500 children who produced more than 40,000 images.
Evenings at the old hotel inspire and evoke the best in its guests.
At the hotel there will be some of the album books “3 stories in 1 click” published by the independent label 27 Pulqui, Fa Editora and Fundación Gráfica Campichuelo, in which more than 150 photographers, writers and cartoonists took part; There will also be posters expanding the exhibition.
“I’ll call you Friday” also returns and reopens for vacationersthe bookstore project that, together with the legacy of the Spanish writer Almudena Grandes (1960-2021) whose title of one of his novels gives its name to the project, and to the desire of two book lovers, brought a bookstore to the coastal town of Ostende for the first time with a catalog of novelties and particularities designed for tourists and vacationers but also for their own. “Last year it reached out to hotel guests and it was very well received. We really like the idea of having been a hotel with a library and now with a bookstore,” says Salpeter.
On January 13 and 14 from 1 to 7 p.m. in the parador garden there will be a sale to the public. “Last year, despite the restrictions that still existed due to the pandemic, we had a beautiful and enriching experience, we verified the importance of bookselling: people want to talk, exchange ideas and readings, and receive recommendations. Something that as professionals in the publishing world we already knew but that the project showed us forcefully”, says Paulina Cossi, another of the promoters of the project.
Tuesday and Thursday in January and February at 5:00 p.m. there will be guided tours of the hotel, traveling between the present and the past of 100 years of history, recalling anecdotes and events
“This season we launched the website where you can see the complete catalog with the titles that can be purchased only at the hotel, www.tellamareviernes.com.ar, and at the Viejo Hotel Ostende spa we will repeat that meeting with readers”, remember.
Tuesday and Thursday in January and February at 5:00 p.m., meanwhile, there will be guided tours of the hotel, traveling between the present and the past of 100 years of history, recalling anecdotes and events.
Bioy and Silvina Ocampo, regular pioneers of the old Hotel Ostende.
While at 8:00 p.m. on Twelfth Night and with the first full moon of the year – loungers and tarpaulins on the sand of the spa – the Cinemar will open (it is suspended due to rain) with the projection of the comedy “Clementina”from the production company El Pampero Cine.
Y will continue on February 5 at 8:00 p.m., the second full moon night of the yearwith a tribute to the pioneers of cinema Georges Méliès, Segundo de Chomón, Fritz Lang in the projection of “The astronomer’s dream” (1898), “The trip to the moon” (1902), “Voyage to Jupiter” (1908 ) and the trailer for “La mujer en la luna” (1929) by the company Máquinas de mirar, whose objective is to disseminate, promote and bring young and old closer to the stage prior to the birth of cinema, vindicating the old techniques of animation as a bridge to understand the technologies of the present through play and creativity.
In fact, they will be responsible for kaleidoscope construction workshop to look at the moon that will take place on Saturday, February 4 at 6:00 p.m. in the spa of the old hotel with prior registration at [email protected], and the kinetic art event that will take place on Sunday, February 5 at 7:00 p.m.
