_Sophie Calle I

_"Room 30 - March 4th/Chambre 30 - 4 mars" 1981
Colour and BW photographs, frames / Photographie couleur et N/B, encadrement
39 x 55 inches (x2) / 100 x 140 cm (x2)
1/3+1 set indivisible

"On Monday, February 16, 1981 I was hired as a temporary chambermaid for three weeks in a Venetian hotel. I was assigned twelve bedrooms on the fourth floor. In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the personal belongings of the hotel guests and observed through details lives which remained unknown to me. On Friday, March 6 the job came to an end."

_L’Hotel

In 1981, Sophie Calle spent three weeks working as chambermaid in a hotel in Venice. This allowed her to spy on the guests. Like a detective or crime photographer, she photographs the momentarily unoccupied hotel rooms: she photographs the unmade or never slept in beds, the stray items left in bathrooms, the contents of suitcases and closets; she reads letters left lying in the open, takes photographs of the guests, and does even more. Sophie Calle published the photographs within the diary-like report of her ‹observations,› in the book entitled «Ecrit sur l’image. L’Hotel». Calle turns the viewer or reader into an accomplice of her voyeurism – filling them, too, with the urge to move unobserved through another’s private sphere. Like with many of Sophie Calle’s works, photographs and texts exist in a circular self-referring structure: the objects that Calles mentions in the text are found again in the photographs, but their role as evidence is first established through the telling of the story, whose believability lies solely in the hands of the artist.

Publication: Sophie Calle: L’Hôtel, Paris, 1984

Words by Susanne Holschbach