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Awesome cheesecake photos from the weirdest, kitschiest ‘sex hotel’ in Colombia
05.19.2016
01:12 pm
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Here’s a fascinating collection of pictures from Kurt Hollander, a photographer originally from New York City whose current base is Mexico City.

Recently Hollander visited Cali, Colombia, in particular a remarkable “sex hotel” called the Hotel Kiss Me, each of whose 180 rooms is painted and decorated according to its own different theme by local artists. Hollander was given the run of the place for two weeks, during which he invited some female friends of his—they’re not prostitutes—to pose in the rooms as if they were seducing a lover.

To be clear, while prostitution is legal in Colombia, the main purpose of the Hotel Kiss Me is to serve as a venue for a sexual getaway for couples.

While the purpose of the Hotel Kiss Me is certainly interesting, it’s the vibrantly decorated rooms that are the real star. “Kitsch” might be too bland a term for the hilarious and lovely rooms on display in Hollander’s pictures—many of the rooms are based on representations from a certain country, and the artists were just as likely to stick in an image of Adolf Hitler saluting a Volkswagen Beetle as they were to put Saddam in the Iraq room next to an image of burning oilfields. (One of the rooms has an image of 9/11, which you can see at Vice.)

Hollander’s show about the Hotel Kiss Me is called “The Architecture of Sex” and can be seen at Proyectos Impala in Ciudad Juárez until May 25.

He’s an interesting fellow. After a nasty case of salmonella, which led to severe chronic ulcerative colitis, Hollander wrote a memoir called Several Ways to Die in Mexico City. He’s also published a book of photographs documenting the rough-and-tumble streets (really, they once were that!) of downtown Manhattan called Low Rent: A Decade of Prose and Photographs from The Portable Lower East Side.
 

 

 
More from the Hotel Kiss Me after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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05.19.2016
01:12 pm
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Picos on blast: Systema Solar and Colombia’s bad-ass sound system culture

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The speakers of El Dragon
 
As familiar as we are with the Jamaican sound system tradition, it shouldn’t surprise us wherever we find the grass-roots praxis of bumping bass through massive speakers in a non-club setting. Witness for example the pico sound systems of the Colombian port city of Barranquilla off the Caribbean Sea, which like their Jamaican counterparts have been in effect since at least the ‘50s.

People debate the origin of the term pico—is it derived from pick-up trucks that transport the speakers, or from the common practice of picking up the needle on a popular record to start again? But there’s no debate that these systems are a crucial way for underground DJs to break tunes from tons of genres, including cumbia, salsa, calypso, dancehall reggae, soukous, champeta (a Carribean-tinged northern Colombian boogie style), Afrobeat and more.

Plus, any pico worth its salt seems to be obsessive enough about its name and theme that it gets its speakers hand-painted accordingly, with imagery ranging from Camacho Indian hunters to burly combat tanks.

The seven-piece Systema Solar seems to be the savviest group to have emerged from the pico scene—they’ve leveraged their versatility into a touring outfit, and have played throughout Europe and parts of the US. As you’ll see here, they know how to harken back to their roots…
 

 
After the jump: El Gran Fidel, plus the New York-based Dutty Artz crew documents how bananas it gets at a pico dance, complete with speaker-diving and hose-downs from the local fire brigade…
 

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Posted by Ron Nachmann
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08.03.2010
02:06 am
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The Fuego This Time: The Rise of Colombia’s Bomba Estereo & Worldwide Tropical Bass

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Bogota duo Bomba Estereo started out in 2005 comprised of multi-instrumentalist/producer Simón Mejía and singer Liliana Saumet. As the infectious “nu-cumbia” sound started making waves around that time, groups like B.E. have become its young, largely educated face. They’ve become a full band that’s currently on worldwide tour.

As shown by clip #2, the tropical bass scenes currently burgeoning throughout West African and Latin America (along with their European diasporas) are not going unnoticed by global marketing agencies.
 

 

 

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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06.24.2010
01:09 am
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