Art in Park

In cooperation with the ECOC team, the Hit Hotel Park in Nova Gorica organised a lecture and workshop on "How to turn a city hotel into a home for contemporary artistic practices?"

Forty years ago, Hit opened its first casino in the Park. The company marks this important anniversary throughout the year with various events for guests and employees, with a special focus on the local, cross-border area.

By thoughtfully combining the economic and artistic worlds, they are revealing to the public some of the undiscovered cultural gems of the area. These include a rich collection of graphic works by artists from the cross-border coastal area, which have enriched the Park Hotel throughout history. The selection comprises more than 100 prints by artists from the cross-border Littoral area, created between 1951 and 1989. Among the artists are Riko Debenjak, Avgust Černigoj, Negovan Nemec, Vladimir Makuc, Klavdij Tutta and others.

To celebrate its 40th anniversary, they want to upgrade the hotel with a unique, limitless experience, and the common areas of the hotel will be transformed into a unique gallery spread over five floors of the hotel. This precious heritage, which preserves, values and interprets the past of the area along the western Slovenian border, will be revived not only for the hotel guests, but also for all interested visitors, and will serve as an inspiration for the creators of new generations.

Stojan Pelko, head of programme of GO! 2025, stressed that "the transfer of best European practices is one of the missions of the European Capital of Culture".

That is why GO! 2025 invited to Nova Gorica a guest from Vienna, Croatian cultural manager Vanja Žanko, who gave a lecture and a workshop on the possibilities of linking art and business. She said that "the collection represents an exceptional cultural capital, which is worth presenting not only to the local but also to the widest possible European public".

Vanja Žanko is the founder of Nomad, a platform for the promotion of art. She has worked for many years with the world-renowned visual artist Olafur Eliasson in Berlin, as well as with renowned institutions such as Tate Modern (London), Kunsthaus (Zurich), Musee suvremene umjetnosti (Zagreb), Camera Austria (Graz) and the Venice Biennale.

The workshop provided participants with valuable inspiration on how to realise the potential of the Park Hotel's unique art collection, which is scheduled to open to the public this autumn. As Suzana Pavlin, Sales Manager at Hit, pointed out, "it is in the contemporary approach to the collection that they see an opportunity for the future". In association with GO! 2025, Hit sees the opportunity to build on the graphic collection and place it in the official ECOC programme as part of the Community Stages and Galleries project.