Hotel Europa “uses images of a long train journey (Vienna-Prague) as elements able to figurate an investigation and a reflective construction to the collective memory of Europe, to the image that Europe has of itself. We are in the geographic heart of the continent, in an Europe of a specific culture, although very composite, eccentric to the great powers (or rather, the border of several worlds), while essential in creation of the political and cultural facts of the continent and the world. [...]
A long journey is made of repetitions that are stressed by the speed, the point of view interior to the train, the impossible recognition of the outdoor places, the rhythmic cadence of the railroad stations, first ‘non-places’ of industrial civilization. But if the viewer is disposable to appreciate the work in its totality, sitting in front of the window in which the screen it is transformed, he enters in the artist’s game: he supposes himself travelling, he thinks in other things (we think in all things of the life while we are looking at the scape and not necessarily in the de-composition of the landscape in itself), he understands the relationship between the programmatic intention of the author and the significant elements of the landscape, he links the projection time to a cinematic time-place where he is placed as a personage, he integrates a narrative - and a monologue...”
João Lima Pinharanda, “ ... in continuous sessions ...” in “Continuous Session”, exhibition catalog, CAMJAP Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, September 1998