photography MANUELE GEROMINI & LAURA VILLA BARONCELLI
The Silver Beach Hotel was built in Hungary in 1984, during the Kadar-era Communist regime. The 30-year-old building overlooks Lake Balaton, in Siófok, and is renowned for its architectural style, characteristic of the time.
The SZOT resort (which stands for the National Council of Trade Unions) was built and managed by an elected corps that spanned the Hungarian industrial sectors and other unions under Communism. The hotel was a members-only institution. Only those in the organization could apply for holidays at the resort.
“He pinned the enlargement on a wall of the room and that first day he spent a while gazing at it and remembering it in that comparative and melancholy operation of remembrance in the face of lost reality; his frozen memory, like every photo in which nothing was missing, not even and most of all nothing, the true scene setter.”
-Julio Cortázar
(Telephone call from X: he tells me about his vacation, but never asks a single question about mine, as if I had not stirred for the last two months. I do not regard this as indifference; rather the demonstration of a defense: where I wasn’t present, the world has remained motionless: great security. It is in this fashion that the immobility of the maxim reassures perturbed organizations.)
-Roland Barthes
Today the hotel is open to all guests, with a nostalgic name: Silver Beach Retro Hotel.
special thanks to Almagreal www.almagreal.net
