Sophie Calle – författare

År 1981 tar konstnären Sophie Calle arbete som städerska på ett hotell i Venedig. Hon spionerar på gästerna, registrerar deras ägodelar och fotograferar rummen när de inte är där. Hotellet är resultatet av hennes konstnärliga detektivarbete.

Sanna historier är Sophie Calles rörande bok om centrala händelser i hennes liv. Från barndom, familj till äktenskap och ensamhet. Med en rad korta anteckningar berättar hon sanna historier, i närhet till fotografier hon tagit.

A catalogue raisonné of never-before-seen abandoned projects by the artist Sophie Calle. ‘I hate things being finished. Death is final… Life is in the ‘almost finished’.’ - Pablo Picasso ‘But when everything comes to an end, what will become of the ideas that went nowhere, that were biding their time in boxes, in coffins? Before we die, we must catalogue our attempts, our first drafts, our abandoned projects, and give life to our intentions. It’s a way of putting an end to it.’ - Sophie Calle Accompanying her exhibition ‘A toi de faire, ma mignonne’ at the Musée Picasso in Paris, Sophie Calle invites the reader to explore a catalogue raisonné of her unfinished ideas. These accounts, each stamped with a red verdict giving the reason that they were not completed, offer a parallel to her True Stories, a collection that has been regularly reissued since 1994. In this landmark publication, which reveals the hidden aspects of an artistic practice spanning decades, the main themes of her work come to light: coincidence, chance encounters, and incompletion as an ending in and of itself; and trying and failing as the necessary byproduct of the artistic act.

Between 1978 and 1981, Sophie Calle went on a clandestine exploration of the then abandoned Hôtel du Palais d'Orsay. She selected room 501 as her home and without any pre-established method, set about photographing the abandoned hotel over 5 years. As she explored, she picked up items she found: room numbers, customer reception cards, old telephones, diaries, messages addressed to a certain “Oddo” and more besides. What happened to room 501? More than 40 years later it has disappeared and an elevator has taken its place. At the invitation of Donatien Grau, the Musée d’Orsay curator, Sophie Calle returned, equipped with a flashlight, to explore the site again during the lockdown period. She hunted down the ghosts of the Palais d'Orsay, now connected to the present by the visitors that had also deserted the museum. The work reconstructs the artist’s archive of photography, letters, invoices and other daily items which bring a forgotten past back to life. To provide commentary on her discoveries, Sophie Calle called upon the archaeologist Jean-Paul Demoule, who writes a series of texts combining fact and fiction. All this evidence has been assembled together to create an objet d’art which resembles an investigation notebook.

The book traces the transformations undergone by a series of portraits from the exhibition ‘Les Aveugles’ following a storm. Mould had taken hold of the photographs, and the author could not bring herself to throw them away as they were.Shortly before the opening of my exhibition “A toi de faire, ma mignonne” at the Picasso Museum in Paris, a storm caused damage to my storeroom and mould spores seeped into “Les Aveugles”. According to the conservators, it would have been better to destroy the works. But this series had meant too much to me to simply throw it away. So I decided to let the mould take its course, whilst taking photographs as time went on.