Sophie CalleThe Hotel

Sophie Calle’s artist’s book inventories the ordinary and the extraordinary in a Venetian hotel, Hotel C, where the artist was a chambermaid in 1981. Through photography and writing, she captures snapshots of lives. Packing a microphone and a camera into her cleaning cart, she began to investigate the lives of the guests, monitoring the state of the beds, reading their newspapers, books and postcards, smelling their perfumes and observing their clothes or carnival costumes. She ends up knowing their dates of birth and blood types, their sexual habits. This work on intimacy and narration, present in the book “Double Jeu”, is published here separately for the first time.