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Rental Unit Reimagined is an exhibition in an Airbnb. The exhibition seeks to examine what artistic possibilities are uncovered when the tourist sector invents categories of public space that blurs the lines between what’s common and what’s private. The 6 local artists included in the exhibition have produced site specific works, responding to the place and its context.
Just a few decades ago, the modus operandi when booking vacations was to call up a travel agent and ask them to find you a room in a three or four star hotel. Hotels, with their sterile interiors and continental amenities offered an experience of comfort moulded after western, so called universal standards. The hotel served as a safe haven, a place where tourists could retract and enjoy a moment of mute familiarity away from the messy realities of the local.
As the infrastructures paved by unregulated market logics allowed new forms of travel agencies to appear, new types of travel accommodation came with them. Paired with a rising demand for “authenticity” and access to the “backstage”, the contemporary tourist started to look beyond the four star complexes and instead seek to temporarily inhabit the very homes of the locals they visited.
Concurrently with Tromsø rising to one of Norway's most popular tourist destination, the supply of this kind of semi private accommodation has risen with it. As Troms’s building stock becomes online domain, new definitions of public space arise.