Fragility in Sophie Calle: Between Affect and Community

Intimacy and affect are active forces in the work of Sophie Calle. The combination of self and play [je/jeu] drives a practice where ­ambiguity is the engine and narration oscillates between reality and fiction. These creative modes inject a dose of precariousness in her work. Thus, Calle’s approach shoud be considered through the lens of the fragile. Her whole body of work has developed around issues and operational modes charged with fragility. She bases her art on human vulnerability and ­misery. Loss, pain, solitude, failure, death, absence, and emotional ­drifting are at the origin of her pieces, which often present themselves as an outlet for her personal stumbling blocks. The place she gives to chance, encounter and the unknown as well as her openness towards the other in the creative process are modes of production that make the work, in its outcomes, and Calle herself precarious. 

Calle’s beginnings as an artist seem to have laid the groundwork for the aesthetics of failings and contingency that would characterize her work. In Les dormeurs (1979), she successively invited twenty-eight people, mostly strangers she met on the street, to sleep in her bed in an effort to occupy it without interruption for eight days. The work compiled photographs of these bodies caught in moments of abandon, as well as the artist’s notes on the unfolding of the operation, which had its stormy ­episodes. In a manner announcing the whole of Calle’s production, sown with approximate truths that institute zones of uncertainty, the part played by chance in these astonishing encounters was questionable. However, the predominance of the fortuitous set the foundation for a production that would be riddled with erratic movements, whose subjects would bear the mark of hardships and human failings.