After years of traveling and experimental matching, we launched Human Hotel as a curated home-sharing community for purpose-driven travelers.
Creating Human Friction
Creatives and visionaries have always been the first-movers of urban centers. We were the first to open our homes to the “sharing economy” – which quickly became the same old story of wealth transactions pushing human interactions aside.
The current sharing economy landscape consists almost entirely of incentives for generating the most cash. It’s certainly economical, but there’s not a lot of sharing involved.
In fact, the very human meeting at the core of “sharing” is sought removed for the sake of frictionless profits.
We believe it’s time to turn that upside down, because when you actually care, you don’t mind the friction. On the contrary, new ideas and lasting memories all arise from effort and engagement.
It’s worth something to personally open the door, when a stranger has traveled from the other side of the planet to live in your home. This is a new story. Human friction is beautiful.
Wooloo
— people
We are the artists, curators and (sometimes) visionaries of the Wooloo collective and the art community Wooloo.org, the world’s first online community for professional artists founded in 2002. Since then, we have worked with human matchmaking as our artistic format.
For over a decade, we’ve exhibited our social sculptures at a wealth of art institutions and biennials including Artists Space, Manifesta 8, Van Abbbemusuem, Athens Biennale, and the 55th Venice Art Biennale among many others.
We’re currently based out of an old chocolate factory in Copenhagen, Denmark, and focus all our time on the social sculpture that is Human Hotel.
Human Hotel
— team
CARLA
Assistant Curator
SARA
Assistant Curator
SIXTEN
Co-founder / Curator
WILL
Co-founder / Tech & Design
MARTIN
Co-founder / Curator
TROUBLE
Branding / Partners
NICOLAS
CTO
Our
— story
Back in school, in the days before Facebook (and even Myspace), we had the idea to create a social network for matching artists with exhibition organizers. This became Wooloo.org.
A few years later we moved to Berlin and opened up a gallery and project space in Mitte where you could request a new life.
(It took months before someone finally did!)
We also ran an Avantgarde Dating service matching artists as couples based solely on their work. The idea was to challenge the concept of monogamy.
In NYC we took experimental matching to the next level with our Life Exchange. Participants left a Chelsea townhouse with each others clothes, keys, wallets and lives.
Back in Europe, we organized a festival that matched artists, creative projects and experimental architects with unused Berlin spaces.
(So much fun! Berlin was still full of cheap spaces back then.)
Our festival favourite was Fictive Days, a project that invited people to live as their preferred fictional character for 2 weeks…
(and stay in character of course!)
…and two of them ended up getting married – for real!
(They’re still married today)
Then came the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen where we helped 3,000 activists find housing by matching them to local hosts.
(Here’s a Peruvian shaman conducting a ritual for Mother Earth with her Danish host)
After that big task, we moved down in scale and asked a small Danish village to stop watching TV for a week and adopt their neighbor’s life instead.
Commissioned to create a work for the Manifesta 8 biennial, we invented a non-visual residency program and matched 5 international artists with 5 blind locals to live and produce work together in a completely dark space.
(Read the Artforum article)
The City of Copenhagen hired us to create a 3-year program for visiting artists to live with local hosts, collaborate on projects, and publicly exhibit the results inside their private homes.
A science conference requested our help with hosting 30 scientific Ph.D students so we reached out to a large community of beekeepers and matched them together.
(This resulted in a ton of home-brewed mead)
Oh, forgot to mention that we also invented a Spiritual Council that matched local politicians with clairvoyants helping them to look into the future.
(Watch the film about this unique collaboration)
Or that we built a huge public candy machine and sold edible sweets made from the hair of bankers guilty of ‘insider trading’ during the financial crisis.
(That has nothing to do with matching people but what a trip it was to get their hair…)
