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by Sophie Calle.
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Photographs by Sophie Calle
Siglio Press, 2024. 304 pp., 6x8".
It’s 5:00pm on Monday, April 1st, 1979, and Sophie Calle has one rule: her bed must be occupied at all times, between now and 10:00am next Monday. She has a plan, or so she thinks, because she has meticulously scheduled twenty-seven friends, friends-of-friends, and curious or bored strangers to come over to her apartment and sleep in her bed with the chronological synchronicity of a relay race. Logistically, she has prepared a menu to offer upon arrival or departure, fresh sheets if desired, a voice recorder, a camera, and a questionnaire through which these volunteers will divulge everything from their dreams to their occupations to their histories of bed-wetting. Symbolically, she has purchased a goldfish which will stand watch in her bedroom to demarcate this week of…art? labor? slumber exchange? espionage? That is for the “sleepers” to define.
But, but, but: Bob the Trumpeter needs to take a bath. Graziella and Françoise insist on airing out the room first. Maxine will only settle into a nap if his coworker joins him. X the Babysitter’s jealous fiancé would prefer she take the sofa. Jean-Yves Le Gavre is day-drunk and running three hours behind, Marino is four hours late, and Maggie has altogether disregarded the appointment. Henri-Alexis doesn’t like the magnetic aura of the sheets. Once in bed, their needs lengthen, and nothing short of Valium, sex, silk pajamas, a book, a beer, a gust of fresh air, the radio, a phone call, a cigarette, silence, closed doors, open windows, a wall-and-pillow fortress, and/or their dog will suffice as a tranquilizer. Sophie’s Sleepers are in fact human beings, still very much awake, with eccentricities and predilections and some apprehensions about why exactly they have agreed to crawl into her bed in the first place. And so her game begins.
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A Sophie Calle Project is at its best when its initial scheme grows legs and runs circles around itself, persuading happenstance and human error to disrupt the rulebook, and that is precisely what unfolds throughout this week. Her subjects push back. They answer her questions with meandering diatribes or not at all. They’re annoyed or hungry or lusty or not yet tired. They’re laid bare in their idiosyncrasies yet remain impenetrable; they know they’re being watched. Voyeurism is a reciprocal mirror, and the specimens placed under glass have some observations about their examiner: “She’s mad.” / “This needs to stop, this acting like a social lunatic who asks questions and says nothing about herself.” / “Sophie, really, I find this a bit excessive. You’re spying on the most intimate moments. It’s unacceptable. If this is how it’s going to be, we’ll go to sleep.”
To follow the rules and fall asleep in her bed is, ironically, the eject button out of her game. Sleep is the least interesting thing that can happen here.
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Les Dormeurs was Calle’s first major project and a harbinger of what was to become of her now half-century career as an artist-writer-investigator of the human condition, and it has at long last arrived stateside as The Sleepers by way of Siglio Press and translator Emma Ramadan. The book itself is an intimate object whose tactility falls somewhere between a pillow and a sacred text, with its cushioned navy cover and three hundred silver gilded pages. It is meant to be read and regarded in equal measure, as images follow the lead of their textual counterparts, cataloging one sleeper after the next and confirming in black-and-white evidence what Calle has recorded in words. Look, there really were people in her bed. This man was a mouth-breather; this woman was nude. A tangle of limbs here; a snuggling cat there. Here they laid awake, smoking cigarettes before breakfast, sipping champagne, reading a newspaper, buttoning a shirt, staring back at the camera, greeting the next in line. The photographs of these gestures are grainy and monotone and satisfying in the way that crime scene photographs are satisfying – not for their technical craftsmanship but rather for the matter-of-fact secrets they reveal for our visual consumption.
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It could go without saying that The Sleepers is not about sleeping, but rather those vulnerable, banal threshold moments usually shrouded by the curtain of night and solitude. If there is a narrative to be found in this game, it resides in the very peculiarities that render these participants insubordinate to its “stay in bed” rule – much in the same way a lover’s scrupulous nail clipping routine delivers more intrigue than whether or not they happen to snore. If one dies as one lives, then perhaps sleeping is the next best parallel lens we have onto the precarious business of living.
In the wake of this experiment, Calle would go on to, among other things, excavate occupied hotel rooms under the auspices of a chamber maid; hire a private detective to shadow her; follow a man to Venice for a whisper of a reason; publicly dissect a breakup letter, an abandoned address book, and her own mother’s death with the surgical aloofness that has become her signature affect and greatest tool. But first, she asked people to sleep in her bed, that unruly horizontal stage on which we spend a third of our lives, and documented their prostrate improvisations.
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Now it is 10:00am on Monday, April 9th, 1979, and Sophie Calle has made a heap of concessions, inserted herself and her family members as bed doubles for some absentees, and gradually neglected her questionnaire. She has absorbed the trepidations of her sleepers and acquiesced to their chaos. They have run circles around her, and taking their cue, the goldfish has leapt from its bowl to its demise. Her gaze slackens; there is no one left to watch. She strips the sheets. The unraveling becomes this book.
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