Hotel Obscura is the long term curatorial and network initiative of Mezzanine Spectacles (FR), Die Fabrikanten (AT), Ohi Pezoume (GR), and triage live art collective (AU) in association with selected EU/AU partners. By appropriating and inhabiting a hotel space in Vienna, Athens, Paris, Marseille and Melbourne, Hotel Obscura will offer professional development opportunities for trainee, established and emerging artists within site specific live art performance research laboratories in each partner city. The project will focus on the creation of live art: intimate, interactive and site-specific works which will be presented within a major performance outcome in tandem with a 3 day ‘Performing The City’ Conference in Melbourne, Australia at MIAF (Melbourne International Arts Festival) in October 2015. Alongside this major presentation platform several key creative strategies will be implemented throughout the Hotel Obscura project in order to create, sustain and build a richly expanded, value-added cooperation that spans partners in three EU countries and Australia. Hotel Obscura is in essence a collaboration project that seeks to develop long-term artistic networks and project-based cooperation between artists, producers, and organisations in the innovative field of participatory performance and the expanding socio-cultural sense of gift culture within a 24 month project. It is a highly developed, unique and innovative collaboration initiated through strong aesthetic, political and social concerns. It is also a high quality partnership in terms of the partners expertise (live art, geopolitical and audio-gaming based works) which seeks to transform perceptions of time, distance, globalisation and the wider urban fabric for a wide range of audience-participants in four partner cities.Hotel Obscura will investigate the complex relationship between travel, distance, time and identity for EU and AU artists, organisations and audiences.