One Hotel, opened in 1971 by Italian artist Alighiero Boetti with Gholam Dastaghir in Kabul, Afghanistan.
“In the spring of 1971, Alighiero Boetti arrived in Afghanistan. The Italian artist was seeking a “distant thing,” he said. Certainly he had plenty to get away from. Boetti’s career had begun in the early 60s, in Turin, and his spryly conceptual artworks had been identified with the Arte Povera movement. But he had drifted away from Arte Povera’s “guerilla war,” and was surely dismayed by the onset of the Italian “Years of Lead” — bombings, kidnappings, and shootings, perpetrated by neofascists and leftists alike. Afghanistan was a world away, a pacific, unspoiled place of great natural beauty. “I considered traveling from a purely personal, hedonistic point of view,” Boetti once said. “I was fascinated by the desert… the bareness, the civilization of the desert.”
That civilization, it should be noted, had really great dope. Kabul was then a way station for India-bound hippies, seekers, and other Western expatriates who would hang out on Chicken Street in Shahr-i-Naw, downtown. Boetti first stayed at a fleapit hostel, where he embarked on a new work, 720 Letters from Afghanistan. Naturally, he required a lot of stamps. A waiter at the hostel displayed considerable enterprise in obtaining them, and one day Boetti asked his new friend about his dreams for the future. “I would love to have my own hotel,” said the young man, whose name was Gholam Dastaghir. “And if I did, I would run it in such a way that you would fall in love.”
Boetti already had. His first trip lasted only a few months, but before the year was out he would return with his wife and small son. Back in Kabul that autumn, Boetti sought out the waiter and pressed a wad of bills into his disbelieving palm. Together they opened a hotel, which they named, after considerable discussion, the One.
It was at the One Hotel that the Italian conceived his most celebrated and emblematic artworks, the Mappa, a series of embroidered maps of the world. Each Mappa is a flattened globe in the form of an Afghan rug, depicting the familiar outline of the continents, with nations and territories blocked out in the colors and designs of their flags. While his maps clearly evoked the medieval tradition of the Mappa mundi, Boetti’s works also referred back to his 12 forme dal 10 giugno 1967, a set of twelve copper sheets incised with the outlines of conflict zones, including Territori occupati, a tracing taken from La Stampa of the Palestinian territories on the last day of the Six-Day War. The following year he followed up this burgeoning interest in maps, politics, and moments suspended in time with Verso sud l’ultimo dei paesi abitatié l’Arabia (“Toward the South, the Last of the Inhabited Countries Is Arabia,” a title taken from Herodotus’s History), a drypoint composition on a quick-setting metallic plate, such that the indentation made by the needle became fainter as the etching progressed, and the words increasingly illegible.”
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