SOPHIE CALLE, UNTITLED

Protagonist:

• Sophie CALLE

Sophie Calle has made her own life the central focus of her work as an artist. From the Pompidou Centre to the Venice Biennale, via New York and Berlin, her creations often mix texts, photographs, videos and installations in a spectacular or even provocative manner. Tailings of strangers, portraits of sleepers, sleepless night at the top of the Eiffel Tower, a perilous marriage in Las Vegas, letters of romantic break-up, filming of her mother’s death: following a precise rule of the game, each of her endeavours is more or less the direct result of a lived experience and has a therapeutic as well as an artistic function. It is a way of fighting absence, loneliness and death. For this documentary from the “Empreintes” collection, Sophie Calle has chosen to relate her life to Victoria Clay Mendoza, the director, in the form of a letter read aloud and to throw open the doors of her studio and the drawers of her archives. Multiple sequences filmed in the cardinal places of the artist’s personal universe are inserted into this plot: her house in Camargue, where the memories of her childhood and youthful adventures are rooted; her studio in Malakoff, where she works and keeps hundreds of objects and documents that are as many signs of her intimate existence and materials of her work; or the small cemetery in California, where she snapped her first photographs and where she decided to be buried. For Sophie Calle, an artist in constant search and concern for others and herself, art is life itself. This original and funny, kaleidoscopic self-portrait is one more demonstration of this.