Last week, ibis Styles hotels kicked off a new series of events where collaborative art and creativity will take centre stage: the #OpenpARTy. For such a special occasion, the world-leading hospitality group Accor took to one of its new hotels, the ibis Styles Copenhagen Orestad, where a mix of local and international artists, influencers, and other creatives got together for a soirée filled with exciting surprises, digital art, an interactive photo booth, and more.
But what exactly is this new series of events? “The #OpenpARTy concept is one of the many distinctive ibis Styles experiences that guests will not find elsewhere. By engaging the public to co-create with local artists at our hotels, we are showing our support for artistic experimentation, authenticity, and self-expression, while inviting guests to truly become part of the art,” explains Marie-Agnès Froment, ibis Styles Brand Director, Accor. “Across our ibis Styles network, our #OpenToCreativity programme is pushing culture forwards, celebrating creativity, and unlocking access to a like-minded global community. For guests, our hotels open the door to local creative culture; for our talented neighbours, we provide space to meet, collaborate and showcase their artistic talents,” she concludes.
With such an exciting project ahead, we travelled to ibis Styles Copenhagen Orestad to experience it first-hand. Even though the group has hundreds of hotels in over fifty countries around the globe, it wasn’t until last February that ibis Styles opened its first hotel in Denmark. As Louise, the General Manager, explained to us in a short tour of the new building, the area it’s located in is expanding as the Danish capital keeps growing. “This area, the surroundings we’re in, used to be pretty much wasteland. It didn’t exist fifteen years ago.”
However, when you take a walk around the Orestad neighbourhood now, you can feel its rapid growth: modern buildings, lots of offices from creative companies like architecture studios, and burgeoning businesses like the renowned Andersen Bakery (literally one minute away from the hotel, where you can grab delicious pastries that fuse European and Japanese cuisines). “We’re located in-between the urban, hip Copenhagen and the nature side on the city’s outskirts.” A perfect mix, in our opinion.
For the first event of the #OpenpARTy series, ibis Styles invited a group of creatives to take part in it, from influencer @terriblementm to illustrator @naranjalidad, to DJ Kasper Bjorke, who played some groovy and house-infused tunes during the evening party. However, the star of the night was Isaac Malakkai, a Spanish-born, Copenhagen-based artist who created a collaborative digital piece live. While guests were drinking Prosecco and indulging in delicious canapés, Malakkai was painting live through a digital tablet that projected into a giant wall.
In a quick chat with the artist before the event, he confessed that it was his first collaborative piece. He received comments and ideas from the other creative collaborators to think of an artwork that represented them all –through details like colours, textures, or specific elements. “I bet a lot of artists are just about their thing, but I’m not like that, so for me it was fairly easy,” he told us. However, he knew some of the other artists and had a lot of respect for them, so “in a way, there’s an added pressure.”
Surrounded by artists, photographers, stylists, influencers, and other journalists, the inaugural #OpenpARTy from ibis Styles was a success: we had the opportunity to share an evening with like-minded creatives, take fun pictures at a photo booth that used AI software to transform the final images, and get outrageously dressed (guests were encouraged to come in artsy style rather than business-focused suit-and-tie ensembles). Now, we’ll just have to wait until the next party. ibis Styles has hundreds of hotels, so where will the next one take us is still a surprise. Stay tuned!
