Textes de salles "A toi de faire, ma mignonne" - 3 ème étage

Inventory of finished projects.

I wanted to draw up a list of all the projects I’ve completed since I started. I counted sixty-one. As I had been tempted one day to borrow a title from crime novels, I went through the inventory and I had the feeling that those titles were waiting for me.

I hate the finished. Death is final. The gunshot finishes off. The almost finished is life. - Pablo Picasso

CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ OF THE UNFINISHED

But if everything stops, what will become of the ideas that are on hold, waiting for their time, in boxes and coffins? Before dying, we must make an inventory of the sketches, the attempts, the abandoned efforts, and bring the intentions to life. A way of finishing with them. Finishing the unfinished.

Twins
Once a year, my friend Cathy and I used to run a photo session with the twins Emmanuel and Max Berque at Contis in the Landes region. It was an inescapable ritual seeking its culmination. But then Max died. Game over.
Max is dead

The laughing cow
In 2017, I was invited to design a collectable version of the box for Laughing Cow cheese. My proposal featured a picture of me with Moïse, a bull that had lost his mother in the Camargue floods and had been fed by the herders. Because my window overlooked his field, he would sometimes visit me and beg for bread. I’d take off my clothes for him and Moïse would lick my breasts, trying to reach the chunk of bread I’d wedged into my armpit. The great/ good? thing about this was that it evoked milking and made people laugh. At first the clients raised the bull’s tongue to cover my nipple. I thought that was worse, but I agreed to it. However, my proposal wasn’t selected.
Censored ?

Dinner in the dark
In November 2001, a stranger sent me an invitation to a dinner in the dark in Montreuil. I went along with two friends, a voice recorder in my pocket and a microphone in my buttonhole. We waited for outside for the landing light to go off before ringing the doorbell. There were a dozen of us around the table, sitting close together. After half an hour, I’d had enough of all the other guests and, since I didn’t like the soup either, I pushed my bowl away and put my head on the table. They asked what I was doing and I said I was having a nap because I was bored. They called me an arrogant bitch. It was funny. Things went on in the same way, we carried on hurling insults at each other. Not being able to see one another, it was all very fluid. It would have made a great boulevard comedy, but on my way out I realised I’d pulled off the microphone when taking off my coat. All that was left of those three hours in the dark were two minutes twenty-eight seconds of sound.
Technical hitch

MISHAPS

Cale Joconde [Mona Lisa wedge]
I received an extraordinary invitation: “Dear Sophie, to see the Mona Lisa, 3 pm on the 16th if you’re free….” When I went into the room where she sits in splendour, there at the far end was the Mona Lisa, naked, out of her frame, with her back to me, having just had a health check. I walked over to her with my heart thumping. When they began to dress her again, I was surprised to read the words  “cale joconde” [“Mona Lisa wedge”] on the back of the stretcher. Was it a sign? Or just an egocentric flight of fancy based on a misspelling of my nam
Wrong Turn

Gestapo épisode
At the age of twelve, my mother decided to flee the mountains of Grenoble, where she and her family had been hiding during the war. She wrote a message to the Germans – intercepted in time by my grandmother – offering to give them her address on condition that she received advance warning of their arrival so she could take refuge. She did however insist that her family should not be hurt. The best bit was the PS: “Most of all, don’t forget my brother”. Too good to be true. NB: In a file called Épisode Gestapo, I found the beginning of this story, but not the ending, on loose pages in my mother’s private diary.
What more can you say?

SKETCHES

Dumped in august
Pierre dumped me in August. Quickly and over the phone. He needed a week on his own to think. So, I made a list of the words that foreshadow the end, words for leaving, and I did an internet search of break-up text messages. It seemed like a good idea but I stopped hurting too soon.
Fleeting Pain

First Love
I could have said so much. That he was the first man I’d loved, the man I informed of his mother’s death, the one who tortured me the most . . . And, aside from a few letters, I was left with nothing but this break-up door C’est un volet de porte. But he was my first great love, I couldn’t illustrate our relationship with a door. And too much time had passed.
Too Late

Childless
I discovered myself described online in seven words: Sophie Calle, an artist childless from choice”. It was radical, yes, but brief. I decided to follow it up. In response to all those who had hounded me with their proselytising, their sinister well-meaning and threatening exhortations, I planned to call my project Sales gosses [Vile brats]. I began by collecting photos of ugly children, ugly pushchairs, ugly bedrooms, and I asked mothers in parks, “What have you given up?” “Do you regret it?” (100 % “no”, like in a banana republic). I noted telling phrases like “FALL pregnant”, sought out people whose birth had caused their mother’s death, put my tolerance to the test at a summer camp, breastfed babies that weren’t mine, simulated pregnancy outside the window of Prénatal, and wore a false bump to meet the photographer Juergen Teller, who was taking my portrait for the New York Times. And then I turned fifty, they left me alone at last and I calmed down.
Expiry

Melancholy Project
When Pierre left, my first plan was to ask couples who seemed happy together to describe to me in detail how they had met. I would go and stand exactly in that place, in the same month, on the same day of the week, at the same time, to see if the miracle would repeat itself. I started on Friday 11 November 2005, 10 to 10.45 a.m. on the Garigliano bridge in Paris, waiting for a dark and handsome forty-two-year-old in a leather jacket, who did the same work as me and was going home to bed after a being up all night, to smile at me. But the pavements remained empty. Over the following days I waited with a white poodle, I waited in a launderette in Châtillon, I waited on a park bench, I waited in a Darty store. There were no miracles and anyway, almost as soon as the project got underway, I lost interest in couples.
Loss of Interest

The price if a secret
I wanted strangers to sell me their secrets. It was F’s job to select people at random, give them a tape recorder, pay whatever they thought fair and pick up the recording. He would not hear their secrets. Meanwhile I was going to listen to them without knowing who was telling them. On the first day, F. came back with two secrets. The woman’s secret dated from when she was twelve and was about her sick mother. The man, at the age of ten, had tormented his brother and torn down a little girl’s pants, ignoring her tears, and this had given him an intoxicating pleasure. He ended his tale after fifty-two minutes, addressing the person who wanted to buy his secret and stating that, if necessary, he would deny it because he had a mission on earth. That sent a chill through me. Plus, neither the man nor the woman wanted to make money from their secrets.
Unsettling

ATTEMPTS

Sleepless night on the Eiffel Tower
Looking down from the first platform of the Eiffel Tower, I photographed workers unrolling turf for a lawn and I asked them to notify me in future when they were doing another job. Six months later I was told that a new phase of work was starting and I tried to imagine what the man I spoke to had put in his diary. Had he written “Eiffel Tower-Sophie Calle”? Afterwards, I’d put my images together with headlines about Eiffel Tower suicides. Because the view of the ground, boards laid in a cross and news in brief items were my kind of thing. But I didn’t follow it up. It was twenty years before I went back to the Eiffel Tower, for the all-night arts festival of 5-6 October 2002, which I spent in a room constructed right at the top. The evening got off to a gentle start. Visitors would come in one by one and tell me a story to stop me going to sleep. But we hadn’t foreseen what would happen next. There were 16,000 of them, it was bitterly cold with gusts of wind, and a four-hour wait. Those who made it to the top took shelter in my hut, but their stories were less important. In the end what mattered was to have spent the night up there, and the excitement of that outweighed all the rest.
Eclipsed

The table 
Every week in my studio on Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, two women would lie down on my long solid wood table. It was 1973, abortion was banned. Thanks to a small number of doctors and the development of a simple and unaggressive method, we arranged to carry out abortions, initially at home. Then abortion became legal, but letting go of the table was unthinkable. It followed me to the south of France, took on a new, quieter life, and gradually turned into a table without a story.
How to tell that story?

The two Sophie Calles
In 2006, as part of research into women called Sophie Calle, I hired a detective from the Duluc agency. The result surpassed my expectations. There were only two in the whole of France, but they had been born in the same hospital, they lived in the same town 100 km from Paris and worked in the same factory. One had taken Calle as her marriedname, the other had had the name from birth. According to the detective, the Sophie Calle from birth lived alone and wanted to be left in peace, having had “very serious family problems”, as he discreetly put it. He preferred not to pursue his investigations and persuaded me not to visit the place. I put it off for a later date.
Interrupted

Wim Wenders
I aI I asked various writers to create a fictional character whom I would try to embody in everyday life, following the novel to the letter. But it didn’t work out as I’d hoped so I tried again with filmmakers. Lars von Trier didn’t reply, Wim Wenders did. Each time I spent the night in a different place he wanted me to film myself in a mirror telling it everything I that was feeling. He sent me some prototype camera-glasses for the purpose. I triedvarious writers to create a fictional character whom I would try to embody in everyday life, following the novel to the letter. But it didn’t work out as I’d hoped so I tried again with filmmakers. Lars von Trier didn’t reply, Wim Wenders did. Each time I spent the night in a different place he wanted me to film myself in a mirror telling it everything I that was feeling. He sent me some prototype camera-glasses for the purpose. I triedsked various writers to create a fictional character whom I would try to embody in everyday life, following the novel to the letter. But it didn’t work out as I’d hoped so I tried again with filmmakers. Lars von Trier didn’t reply, Wim Wenders did. Each time I spent the night in a different place he wanted me to film myself in a mirror telling it everything I that was feeling. He sent me some prototype camera-glasses for the purpose. I tried
Self Censorship

Melancholy project
When Pierre left, my first plan was to ask couples who seemed happy together to describe to me in detail how they had met. I would go and stand exactly in that place, in the same month, on the same day of the week, at the same time, to see if the miracle would repeat itself. I started on Friday 11 November 2005, 10 to 10.45 a.m. on the Garigliano bridge in Paris, waiting for a dark and handsome forty-two-year-old in a leather jacket, who did the same work as me and was going home to bed after a being up all night, to smile at me. But the pavements remained empty. Over the following days I waited with a white poodle, I waited in a launderette in Châtillon, I waited on a park bench, I waited in a Darty store. There were no miracles and anyway, almost as soon as the project got underway, I lost interest in couples.
Loss of interest 

The price of a secret 
I wanted strangers to sell me their secrets. It was F’s job to select people at random, give them a tape recorder, pay whatever they thought fair and pick up the recording. He would not hear their secrets. Meanwhile I was going to listen to them without knowing who was telling them. On the first day, F. came back with two secrets. The woman’s secret dated from when she was twelve and was about her sick mother. The man, at the age of ten, had tormented his brother and torn down a little girl’s pants, ignoring her tears, and this had given him an intoxicating pleasure. He ended his tale after fifty-two minutes, addressing the person who wanted to buy his secret and stating that, if necessary, he would deny it because he had a mission on earth. That sent a chill through me. Plus, neither the man nor the woman wanted to make money from their secrets.
Unsettling

ON HOLD

AMONG NEITHER THE LIVING NOR THE DEAD

 A mother told us, “I’ve looked everywhere, I can’t find him among either the living or the dead”. The journalist Florence Aubenas and I decided to embark on a joint project on missing people. We met the fathers of Emmanuel Bonnissant and Joffrey Dagneau, the mothers of Cédric Vallois and Adrien, the wife of Jean Carat and the daughter of Claude V. Then Florence went off to report on Iraq and, on 5 January 2005, she was abducted. We had been on the trail of people who had disappeared, and we found disappearance. When she was released five months later, she had different priorities and interests. I didn’t give up, I retreated.
Retreat

Seeking images and texts
I had written a short piece on our family myth called “legend of the artichoke” and tried in vain to work out how to fill a frame carved out of an elephant’s ear and how to caption the x-ray of a dog riddled with lead shot. I had snapped away mercilessly at an unknown woman who looked like a Goya painting, photographed children’s graves and the extraordinary windows overlooking the street in the toilets at the Berlin Comic Opera. I had collected ferrotypes showing children whose mothers were concealed by a sheet so as not to appear in the image, and tried to link them to replies from orphans whom I’d asked to describe a mother. The only one who agreed to speak said: “Someone who is never there and always there”. But I couldn’t find the images to go with the text and the frame, nor the text to go with the images.
On hold 

Annuity
I learned from an investigative report that latest investment fashion in the USA was death. A company was offering sick seniors the chance to buy back their life insurance and was acquiring the policies in exchange for a sum of money and payment of the premiums. It then received the capital on the death of the insured party. This had the merit of not beating about the bush: “The risk of a miracle cure cannot be ruled out, but we have elderly people with a wide range of diseases from whom to choose in order to diversify your portfolio. We have diabetes, heart disease, cancer and more.” The job of the advisers was to choose the right patients, identifying them through their purchases of medication on the internet, on the basis that these retirees would die sooner than expected. The screen showed the message that investors would then receive: “We have the pleasure to inform you that policy no. 7200490 has expired more than a year before its expected term.” Enticing.
No time

AT RISK

I still had two televisions, two beds, a battered sofa, books, undeserving clothes, boxes of documents and, on the walls, traces of absence and nails. I preferred not to camp out in my own home. As there was a closed-off room at the far end of my exhibition, I thought of setting up a bedroom there. But the toilet and shower were in the basement and I didn’t see how I could move around at night in a museum with an alarm and video surveillance. So I opted for an office. And so I followed the same path as the things in my life. If you want to talk to me and the window is closed, you can always try knocking. Sometimes I’m behind this door, more often than not elsewhere. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank those who have welcomed me during this nomadic period: L’Hôtel Grand Amour, Paul-Henri Guermomprez, Géraldine and Leopold Meyer.