Hamas have just won the Palestinian elections and a chocolate bar in a Rotterdam hotel room eventually reminds the filmmaker that there are more important things going on in the world outside. Exactly one year later he returns to the same city and checks in at a very different hotel. Pyramids / Skunk is the 5th episode in Smith’s Hotel Diaries series. Made over six years in hotels in six different countries, Hotel Diaries charts the ‘War on Terror’ era of Bush and Blair through a series of video recordings. They relate the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel/Palestine to Smith’s personal travel experiences. In these works, which play upon chance and coincidence, the hotel room is employed as a ‘found’ film set, where the architecture, furnishing and decoration become the means by which the filmmaker’s small adventures are linked to major world events.
