Space and Absence in Sophie Calle's Suite vénitienne and Disparitions

Sophie calle's projects have involved many different sorts of space, among them the streets of Paris and Venice (tailing strangers or near-strangers), the former East Berlin (asking residents to recall Communist statues, symbols, and plaques removed or stolen after reunification), the Trans-Siberian railway (on her way to Japan), a car journey across the US (filming with husband-briefly-to-be Greg Shephard), a boat trip along the coast of Greenland towards the North Pole (to bury memorabilia for her deceased mother), street corners (talking to strangers when they withdraw cash or eavesdropping on a New York telephone booth that she has appropriated), hotel bedrooms (working as a hotel chambermaid and studying the guests' possessions and beds), her bed (in her apartment or sent over to California to help a stranger recover from a break-up), and the top of the Eiffel Tower (again in a bed, for one night, to hear stories during the "Nuit blanche" festival in 2002).¹ Calle has always been interested in subverting stereotypes associated with places, making detours, and observing everyday life from unusual perspectives. In her projects the situation is partly prepared, partly open to the unexpected, starting with a foreseen space but then moving on to the unpredictable spaces of her wanderings and the spaces of her interlocutors' or collaborators' stories, always with accompanying photographs.

Calle's work explores a number of dividing lines, between public and private, friends and strangers, love and indifference, installation and book, performance and interpretation. Each project is a mise en scène, with Calle exposing herself to other's gazes and reflections while observing and listening to them. Her projects therefore contain other perspectives than her own, and during installations the audience can join in with the storytelling and the performance. It was Calle's invitation to strangers to share their painful memories that led Shirley Jordan to reflect on the role of these participants and of exhibition spectators in the configuration of a "soft monument" to particular traumas and shared types of suffering in Douleur exquise (2003).² The potential for intersection between her contributions and those of her collaborators also allows us to consider her role in both halves of her projects, and to think therefore in terms of her absence or presence, or of combinations of both.

This article looks principally at the spaces of two projects, Suite vénitienne (1980), her account of pursuing a man she followed and subsequently met in Paris all the way to Venice, searching for him and tailing him there, and Disparitions (1991/2000), about stolen or damaged artworks from four institutions, notably the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.³ The spaces are initially the result of chance and allow us to plot, visualize, and speculate on Calle's and her target's or collaborators' experience while the projects are being performed. Johnnie Gratton and Michael Sheringham have underlined the lack of a definitive version of the modern project, with the latter arguing too that Calle's installations and phototexts can be seen as traces of the potential situations her projects provoke.⁴ Although Daniel Buren has stated that prior to Prenez soin de vous (2007) some of the exhibitions felt like books on walls, it is also the case that the series of books published by Actes Sud offer particular ways of thinking about Calle's spaces, with her novel approach to Venice in Suite vénitienne and her reanimation of empty spaces in certain museums in Disparitions.⁵

Chance in a Calle project provides the unexpected, but is also part of a system of rules, choices, and combinations (sometimes including the use of a die), in the manner of Duchamp and Cage.⁶ Its role in Calle's engagement with difference and fantasy in her projects, with their echoes of Surrealist chance encounters and Situationist "dérive," can be considered in spatial terms.⁷ As a result of the unpredictable permutations in her work, there is also, as Quentin Stevens puts it, "the risk of loss as well as the possibility of gain."⁸ Calle...