French conceptual artist Sophie Calle has long been a favourite of mine. Once, many years ago, I travelled to Paris specifically to see her show "M’as-Tu-Vue" at the Pompidou Centre.
In February, 1981, the French artist Sophie Calle took a job as a hotel maid in Venice. In the course of three weeks, with a camera and tape recorder hidden in her mop bucket, she recorded whatever she found in the rooms that she had been charged with cleaning. She looked through wallets and transcribed unsent postcards, photographed the contents of wastebaskets and inventoried the clothes hanging in closets. Her only rule, it seems, was to leave untouched any luggage that owners had had the foresight to lock. That is, unless they also left the luggage key, which, for Calle, was as good as an invitation.
The result of this invitation—or intrusion—is “The Hotel,” a diary, organized by room number, that gathers together photographic documentation and meticulous, often droll observation. (In a set of drawers in Room 30: “socks, stockings, bras . . . very well equipped.”)
Read more: The New Yorker
Previously: My review of The Address Book
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