Suite Bette Davis

Bette Davis died several days later after her visit to the San Sebastian International Film Festival in September 1989. After this event, the hotel suite where she stayed at during her visit to the Basque cinema festival was named after her. An act of consolidation of an icon, as well as an extremely vulnerable scenario that held a sick woman reminiscing her years of success as a Hollywood star.

After gaining exclusive access to the “Suite Bette Davis,” I played out loud, from the center of the room, her performance of the song Whatever Happened to Baby Jane on The Andy Williams Show (1962). The campiness of the movie together with the song’s lyrics and her outstanding almost surreal performance on TV constituted a perfect evocation of how I believe Davis used to be like as a performee and persona. By playing this song she came back to being there, in that hotel suite she used to inhabit, now a rancid pseudo-luxury suite.

As a continuation to the action and its video documentation, I made the T-shirt “Bette es Bette – Dios es Dios” (“Bette is Bette – God is God”,) which I am wearing in the photographic diptych edited in collaboration with Jacob Lambrecht as a reminiscence of the T-shirt “Garbo es Garbo”. Suite Bette Davis serves as an ‘imprint-documentation’ of an intimate moment that connects past events and times to current ones stemming from the love for a woman and her legacy.