Motel Cucaracha was an installation revolving around the lonely, miserable lives of three separate cockroach guests, confined and isolated in their motel rooms. Visitors entered the motel-room-like-installation, which doubled as the set for a video piece involving all 3 cockroaches. The video played on the TV within the room , creating an endless cycle of despair.
The original inspiration for the show’s title was the insect trap infamously named “Roach Motel”, which lured our little brown friends into a poisonous chamber from which they never re-emerged. The motel room is the classic “non-place”: a transition space, where one can rest en route to elsewhere, but never truly belong, its inhabitant an inherent outsider, non-native, transient. As compared to its more lavish cousin the hotel, the motel, or “motor-hotel”, is also lower-end, street-level, catering to lower budgets and more pedestrian tastes.
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Cockroaches are almost universally despised, and yet are one of the hardiest, most sustainable species on the planet, provided they can hide underneath a bed or refrigerator. The Motel explored certain classic notions of alienation and transformation, through the eyes of nature’s most reviled and most indomitable creature. What does it feels like to be small, brown and hated (or, to just think that you are?) Perpetual outsiders, immigrants, misfits: who belongs? Who doesn’t? Are these conditions real? Or just in our heads? The Motel raised questions about cultural difference and emotional alienation, filtered through a healthy level of absurdist comedy. It investigated the states of existential crisis, persecution , odium and rejection (both real and imagined) relevant to most human experience .
Just outside the Motel was a row of hand-made doorknob hangers, similar to the kind one finds on a motel room door, indicating whether the guest would like to “please make up room now” or “do not disturb”. These phrases were replaced with more plaintive, existential lamentations expressed by little illustrated cockroaches in a variety of tragic quotes in non-English languages, as would befit an out of place foreigner.
Motel Cucaracha endeavored to bring together others feeling alone and miserable by hosting “Les Nuits des Cafards/ Nights of the Cockroaches,” a series of late-night, cockroach-friendly evening salons, where one of the three Motel cockroaches was in residence . Visitors were expected to dress in a pleasant brown ensemble, and participate in the evening’s activities. Every guest at one of Les Nuits Des Cafards was granted a membership to La Société Des Cafards, a private and elite society not unlike the Freemasons, Skull and Bones or Good Sam Club.
