Last spring, when the lilacs came out in Treptower Park, three of us were standing in the gallery looking at a wall of stretched canvases that had arrived from Kyiv in cardboard tubes. None of them were dry. They smelled like a workshop in a country that had not slept that week. The artist on the phone — calling from a basement in Podil, between sirens — kept apologising for the smell. We told her, in the polite way you tell people things over a bad line, that the smell was the best thing in the building.
This is the third May the Hotel has been open. We do not count from the building's birthday — the building turned ninety-two in February — but from the day the war began, plus three. That is the day we opened the door, in a hurry, with a cracked kettle and a borrowed projector and an idea that there had to be somewhere to go that was not a refugee centre and not an embassy and not a sad bar. We did not plan for the duration. No one did.
In the early months we counted everything: cups of tea, plates of borscht, sleeping bags, calls from Lviv, calls from Mariupol that didn't come through, exhibitions hung in three days, the names of people who did not come back. We stopped counting in the second autumn. It started to feel like a way of holding the war at arm's length, when the work was to bring it close. Now we count differently — residencies, rehearsals, the bills, the seedlings the neighbours bring in May.
What survives a move, in our experience, is the surprising stuff. The seedling someone's mother sent. The cassette tape from a grandmother's attic. The recipe for a soup nobody's family made any more, except the one person who left.
This issue of the Quarterly is dated May 2026, but it is in some sense about the previous Mays — the May of 2022 when the gallery walls were still raw plaster, the May of 2023 when we hosted our first wedding in the glasshouse and ran out of bread, the May of 2024 when Aglaya finished her residency and went home to Kharkiv for two weeks and came back with a suitcase of drawings of her grandmother's kitchen. May is the month the house is most itself. It is the month the doors stay open and the kitchen runs from morning to late.
Four people work here full-time. Eleven more come in for shifts. Forty-three artists have lived in our six guest studios since we opened. (We try to spell the word „studios" rather than „guest rooms" because nobody comes here to sleep, even if some do, on the floor, after rehearsals.) The kitchen team, three of them, are all Ukrainian; one of them, Iryna, was a sound designer in Odesa before. She makes the best soup in the building and runs a small Friday programme of field recordings between courses, which is how we ended up with a sound studio in Room 04.
Three things have changed in the last twelve months and they are worth saying out loud. We can pay artists now — small honoraria, but real ones, on time. We have a board, which we resisted for a long time and which we now find useful. And we have a print run — three hundred copies of this Quarterly, available at the bar for eight euros. The print run is what made me sit down to write this. There is something about a magazine going to a printer that requires you to commit, in a way that a website does not, to telling the truth in the same shape twice.
The truth, this May, is that the house is tired and the war is not over. The truth is also that there are nine residents in the building right now and that two new exhibitions open this month. Olesia Yaremchuk reads from Our Others in the theatre on the 24th; on the 31st, Dakh Daughters arrive for three days of public rehearsal. The garden is full of tomato seedlings the neighbour Frau Kühne brought, as she does every year. The hotel sign over the door — it is the original one, from 1934, with two of the bulbs replaced — is still on at night. Not because anyone is sleeping. Because we are not.
— A. P., May 2026.
