“When Realtors Have a Vision”: Artists Bring an Abandoned Hotel Back from the Dead | Art and design

MMaking my way up a winding, carpeted staircase, I step into what feels like a different world — a building I’ve passed hundreds of times, but never set foot inside. Standing on the first floor of the former P&O Hotel in Fremantle, I’m immediately struck by its moody, almost cinematic beauty: tall stained-glass windows, dark wood moldings, an iron-framed balcony overlooking the High Street like some forgotten lookout point.

First built around 1870 and renovated during the Gold Rush era, this building was for nearly a century a magnet for marinas and crew, with 31 rooms and a bustling bar for sailors known as the Cockpit. But despite being located in the middle of Fremantle’s busiest street, these historic monuments have remained largely empty and off-limits for decades.

But on November 29 and 30, the public is invited inside for Room Service, a maze of displays and installations that form part of the Fremantle Biennial. Over the past three weeks, more than 40 musicians, poets, painters and multi-media artists have occupied the upper floor, creating diverse works in response to its checkered history.

“I don’t think people realize the potential creative output that becomes possible when landlords have the will and vision to back a simple idea,” says musician Danielle Caruana, also known as Mama Kane, who co-curated Room Service with Tom Mueller. “It activates our greatest asset of all: our ideas.”

In the ground floor rooms of the P&O Hotel, a group of local artists, including Caruana, who were meeting weekly under the name Culture Club, began to wonder for the first time why a location so personal and central was often inaccessible. They found themselves circling the same question: What could this place become if artists were allowed inside?

So when the building’s current owners, Nick Trimboli and Adrian Feeney – who are behind Fremantle hospitality ventures such as Little Creatures and Bread in Common – offered a space to use as part of the biennial, Caruana and her collaborators jumped at the chance. Trimboli and Finney plan to revive the P&O as a hotel, but for now its upstairs rooms belong to the artists.

When I visited the hotel, composer Ian Grandage and cellist and singer Mel Robinson were preparing to play a cello duet in one of the hotel’s bathrooms. Drawn to the building’s maritime past and the crew who reside here — “often completely alone,” Grandidge says — the duo created a new interpretation of the 19th-century sailors’ song Little Fish.

“If you strip it away, you feel a kind of painful loneliness,” Robinson says. “The sailor sings a love song to a fish.” A pre-recorded soundtrack of waves and water sounds will be played alongside their live performance, forming what Robinson calls “an ambient kind of sound installation.”

At the top of the hallway, Whadjuk Balladong and Wilman Noongar artist Zali Morgan covered a small room with recycled brown paper, filled with watercolors. Her starting point was the building’s location: a few minutes’ walk from the Round House, a former colonial prison where many Aboriginal men were held before being sent to the work camp at Wadjemup (Rottnest Island) in the 19th century.

“I really couldn’t have done the work without addressing the history of the site, and the colonial legacy that Fremantle was built on,” says Morgan. Her “gestural watermarks,” as she puts it, respond to the “heaviness of the site,” transforming the room into a serene, hand-painted space.

Another room is filled with a chorus of animated faces drawn from the hotel’s past: sailors, nurses, hotel workers and a beloved 19th-century landlady. The work, by Ellen Broadhurst, features plaid faces which she displays on a large papier-mâché head. “This is the ghost of everyone who was in this room before,” she says. “They’re all in hell and heaven, in purgatory and in this room at the same time.”

Artist Jay Lowden turned his room into a playable dystopia: Wet End, a jet ski game set in a future Fremantle engulfed by rising sea levels. He says the game is intentionally “frivolous and saturated…over-juicy and turbo-charged”. In it, the dolphin declares, “We are completely wiped out,” and the sea god responds, “Capitalism is cancer.” Wet End’s upbeat development talk, borrowed from real estate promotion, reflects what Lowden calls our “split vision” – the knowledge that disaster is coming while we continue our pursuit of growth. “It’s about complicity,” he says. “You’re not out of trouble, you’re racing into it.”

Architect Nick Brunsdon took a different approach, stripping the room back to imagine what had stood here long before the hotel – the trees, soil and coastal environment that shaped this part of Fremantle. Working with a researcher of natural pigments, a scent artist, a sculptor, and a furniture maker, he created a serene and sensual haven of marywood, hand-hewn sandstone, jungle scents, and wide, rust-colored curtains. The idea, he says, was to build a “small space for contemplation” that transports visitors to an imagined scene from the pre-colonial period.

As we go back to the beginning, Caruana shows me the bathroom studio where she will present a sound installation produced by filmmaker Luna Lore. The bathing chamber will darken, with a 3D figure flashing inside, accompanied by a looping soundtrack composed by Caruana around the release ritual. “It’s the idea of ​​like, rinse, ponder and repeat,” she says.

Later, as we make our way down the stairs, Caruana ponders what room service really reveals. “Empty spaces are emptiness,” she says. “They create these kind of gaps in continuity. They create gaps in the communication experience.”

She hopes more landlords will recognize the opportunity in inviting artists and creatives to fill these gaps. “There’s a lot of people… can we use your space?” She adds that this transformation is remarkably simple. “It doesn’t take much to say yes.”

• Room Service takes place from 29 to 30 November at the P&O Hotel, 25 High Street, Fremantle, as part of the Fremantle Biennial.