How do you manage to make guests feel at home without losing the sense of place in which the hotel is located?
Feeling at home is a question of overall atmosphere. So although our Hilton brand, product and service standards go a long way in making certain that our guests benefit from all the luxury they’re used to in their own homes, ultimately it’s our people that really make the difference. We try to create a warm and friendly atmosphere in which to work at all of our hotels. That, in turn, ensures our staff has the same frame of mind towards our guests, making them feel at home too.
In addition, no two Hilton’s are identical. Each has characteristics that stem from the influence of the local environment, whether that’s in terms of the materials used, the colours, the decoration, the facilities offered… in fact, our GM’s have the freedom to give their hotel a “look and feel” of its own and to do so, they usually turn to what’s available on the local market, or to dominant local themes and events to reproduce, or “echo”, throughout their hotel.

Do you feel Hilton guests have homogeneous requirements, regardless of where they come from?
No, they certainly don’t, and Hilton Breakfast is a case in point.
Research that we sponsored across European markets showed that everyone’s idea of the perfect breakfast is different – “one size doesn’t fit all”! Since our guests do come from all over the world, it was clear that to increase guest satisfaction, our new Hilton Breakfast offering had to consist of items from all corners of the world too.

Does location affect service customisation so as to inhibit the possibility of offering a standardised level of comfort and facilities?
Obviously, staffing costs vary in different parts of the world. In some places, the ratio of staff to guests is therefore greater than in others.
That obviously influences the level of customisation that’s possible.
On the other hand, guests have different expectations and needs in different parts of the world and in different situations – if they’re on vacation, or travelling for business, for example. Our Hilton brand, product and service standards ensure that wherever they are in the world, they can count on a very wide array of services and facilities.
And depending on where they are, they may also benefit from special features that stem from local market practises.

Do you feel typical food and beverages have a role to play in defining a sense of place?
Yes, of course – that’s why we serve a choice of local wines amongst our “Wine by the glass” selection in each hotel. And it’s also why we always offer local specialities on our menu’s.
Part of the enjoyment of travelling – even on business – is the experience one gets of local culture, whether it’s the food, the people, the places to visit, the climatic or geographic features…
not forgetting that for many people, food really is the quickest way to their hearts! So we do put our hearts into making certain that it’s an enjoyable experience, whatever they choose to eat.

What’s your opinion on small hotel chains with only a few establishments, each of which is highly characteristic and markedly different from the others in the chain?
I’d say “horses for courses”… the features of each hotel in the type of chain you’re talking about certainly reflect their particular customer’s requirements, local market practises and the owner’s mean and preferences. These usually correspond to the needs of specific customer segments in specific circumstances and especially, when guests are travelling for leisure. To summarise, each hotel and each chain, no matter how big or how small, has it’s own particularities.
The important thing is to respond fully to the requirements of the segments you’re aiming at.

Interview by Alessandra Zigliotto

By listening to her dual nature, she achieved a rare ability to invent mental “micro-climates”, opportunities to avoid the here and now and enter the “forever”. However, a listening, thinking mind should not aspire to the noisy confusion of large events but should introduce small ideas. These ideas then generate transformations, tiny but active, nourished by that special form of attention: “making yourself available, like paper”.

There is nothing heroic about it: “see small, hear small and think small”, she writes on those pages typed between 1952 and 1964. Even today, in her book The other rooms (2009), she invites us to listen to shadows: “People need shadows in order to rest. I’d like you to send a bunch of shadows to a friend”. Silent shadows which could be the faces of people loved and lost, but also the shadows created by the sun in a room, which become three-dimensional before our eyes and therefore a welcoming space filled with emptiness created especially for us, a space we can fill with our bodies or thoughts.

Listening to birdsong means understanding what the emptiness of the sky contains: life. Ono’s short film Outro consists of a single image coming in and out of focus. It shows Ono, Sean as a young boy, and John Lennon in a garden, a family appearing and disappearing. It is already in a void, or no longer exists, but the game of disappearing images is guided by the constant presence of the birds.

John Cage, her lifelong friend, also dedicated one of his most famous pieces to birds. The same birds who represent the sound of the skies and also of emptiness, and which represent the soundtrack of silence. We all know what idea Cage had of silence, as he even tried looking for it inside an anechoic chamber and was forced to accept that in the absence of any sound, we hear at the very least the blood flowing through our veins and the beating of the heart. Silence, the music consisting of a rest sign written on a fiveline stave, is nothing more than another anthem to listening, to the noise of the heart, the noise of emptiness, the fullness of meaning we can achieve even when there are no more words. We should mention at this point that Japan, a significant influence on both Yoko Ono and Cage, is a universe in which the kind of silence aimed at listening to the rustling of a falling leaf is much more highly regarded than it is in the West. In this fluctuating world every moment comes and goes, and it is worth remembering this even by just concentrating on the noise that consumes it.

We should remember that ancient practice brought back in vogue by Yoko Ono: the wish tree. It can be an olive tree, a maple or even a simple wooden panel bedecked with handwritten notes declaring our wishes. The artist arrives and gathers them all up, as with the Wish Tree at the 2003 Biennale, makes a small bonfire and delivers them up to the dustbowl of the world. Burning them is not intended to be an offence, but a way of perpetrating our wishes. We, who expressed these desires, have another powerful ritual at our disposal to help us achieve them: not magic, but listening. By writing down what we want, by hanging up that note, we have had to focus on an emotion, a future prospect. Nothing, other than understanding, re-reading and listening to our desire, can help us realise it. Yoko is not a witch, she is an elderly fairy, who now has the wisdom to help us listen to what we feel.

The concept of production does not seem to describe your work very well. Can you think of a word to replace it?
I think the concept of “humanising production” is the principle of our work. Over time, Humberto and myself have given the Italian firms we work with a concept of “hand made” that rises above the banal level, that gives the product a more human feel, more personality. We try to create a dialogue with our means of production, to try and reconcile our ideas with what industry demands.

Is the fact of being Brazilian, children of a country built on a mosaic of cultures and experiences, and living in a society with huge inequalities something that has influenced your work?
We are both lucky and unlucky at the same time. Having grown up and continuing to live in Brazil has given us an insight into many social and economic issues, but we have also encountered a vast wealth of natural resources, which provide real inspiration for our creativity. It is precisely this flexibility in communicating which has allowed us to transport our designs to Italy while keeping our own identity intact.

How do your designs develop? What sources of inspiration have allowed you to reinterpret everyday objects under a new guise?
Most of our inspiration comes from the streets – our products are like portraits of the city of São Paulo which we have a constant dialogue with. A city with twenty million inhabitants, with its traffic and chaotic architecture, which we have managed to portray on the most traditional level, despite everything. We have described the city effectively by using humble materials in our designs. What look to be ordinary, unremarkable materials are presented in a new light, through
technological intervention, but they still maintain their identity, their tradition and their history.

How does the concept of imperfection, which is a key element of “hand made” products, interact with your work?
Imperfections in our work are certainly a value, because they make each piece unique. They give the object a personality during the assembly stage, which avoids the standardised feel of serial production.

Does the recovery of this manual dimension give you a professional and personal satisfaction that cannot be found in standardised production?
Mechanisation damages people. Nowadays we see assembly lines which are increasingly being automated, but we think of an assembly line as a team effort, almost a social process that can create a community and cultivate new ideas.

Interview by Marco Minuz

I like to think of myself as a just and fair person, someone who earns a living by writing. I’m not that keen on all those “post-it” clichés stuck onto me over the years. The first label I abhor is the one that portrays me as a typical Latin-American, a very picturesque sort of guy fated to become a guerrilla fighter. An environment-friendly guerrilla, so to speak, seeing the extensive forests there are across most of South America. I’ve really had to struggle to shake off these clichés, that ultimately deprive one of the right to be considered as merely a thinking human being.

How did you manage to shake them off?
The biggest hurdle was getting over Romanticism. There’s this thing with much of the rest of the world that seems to associate the image of a Latin Americans with boleros, tango, and passionate tragedy. I must admit I was in the romantic groove myself for some time. I was especially attracted by German Romanticism. According to Friedrich Hölderlin’s “man is a god when he dreams, a beggar when he meditates”. That was my policy statement for a while, but in the end I got over it and managed to assert my right to be equally a dreamer and thinker.

In the 1980s after being released from prison where he had been condemned on political charges, he joined Greenpeace.
I was lucky to join the organisation in itsheyday.  Initially, though, I had trouble getting through to some of the activists because of my prevalently political approach to issues. They saw themselves as environmentalists, period.
But I anyway managed to get the discussion running on a political track.

How does being an environmental activist tie in with your political commitment?
My political groundwork in Chile helped me a lot, opening my mind and setting the cultural foundations for a more incisive approach to public affairs, something of which I’m very proud. It’s above all thanks to this sort of training, I feel, that I manage to get my priorities right. That’s what led to my commitment to the cause of environmental protection. I feel that a lot of the environmental problems besetting the planet are rooted in political issues.

As an intellectual, writer and citizen I feel have the duty and opportunity of making a positive contribution to these vital social issues. What were things like then in the organisation?
Great camaraderie. When we were fitting out the vessels in the port of Rotterdam before taking off for a demonstration, the first things into the hold were cases of whiskey and boxes of Cuban cigars. More recently I’ve been strictly forbidden from taking any of these commodities on board the Rainbow Warrior (editor’s note: Greenpeace’s flag-ship) because smoking and drinking on board are prohibited. The world changes, I must say.

Who do you consider as having been your mentors?
Well, I must say my spiritual, cultural and artistic mentor was Uncle Pepe, the black sheep of the family. It was thanks to him that I read Verne, Salgari, London, Melville. I remember him also telling me the story of Galileo’s trial and abjuration with tears in his eyes. He used to love repeating, “And yet it moves!”. He was also proud of his trade as an electrician, at the time the working class élite. He fancied himself as a sort of scientist, and was renowned for his technical prowess; he could really work technological miracles, at times.

For example?
Well, when he designed a device for deaf people to listen to the radio. Italian fashion was all the rage in Chile after screening of the Italian movies Il Sorpasso (The Easy Life) and Rocco e i suoi Fratelli (Rocco and his Brothers).
A lot of people in my neighbourhood, including my father, used to avail themselves of the tailoring services of three sisters, deaf-anddumb since birth. They were very good at their job and rightly appreciated, so good that they specialised in making alterations to old hats and ties, restyling to look Italian. The youngest had some residual hearing ability and could lip-read. She told me her biggest regret was that she couldn’t listen to the radio. So Uncle Pepe set about fiddling with the acoustic membranes of various loudspeakers until he finally came up with a pair of special headphones thanks to which the girl could listen to radio dramas, of which she became a great aficionado. And what’s more, she was able to translate what she heard for her sisters in sign language.

What a great joy it must have been…
Unbelievable! That’s when I also felt I had to chip in and do my bit, so I began writing radio plays, thinking especially of them. It was a small contribution compared to Uncle Pepe’s technological one. Whenever I return to Chile, I always go and visit his grave. The inscription on the tombstone reads: “And yet it moves”. Of course it does, I think! And so I return to the fray, invigorated, no longer beset by my daily cares and woes.

Interview by Mauro Scanu