‘Sometimes I do cruel things – and it’s worth it’: the fabulous shameless art of the great Sophie Calle
I’ve read enough interviews with Sophie Calle to know that the conversation ahead could be tricky. France’s most famous conceptual artist can be a touch evasive. Which is why I’m so surprised by the woman before me, who is friendly and seemingly open, all smiles. She’s wearing big tinted glasses, and behind them I picture her eyes twinkling. Then, 10 minutes in, she tells me she is obsessed with absence. When I ask why, she says: “Why do you live in England? Why are you wearing that sweater? I am not here to do therapy with you.”
She is talking to me from the same Paris apartment she has been living in for almost 50 years. Hanging from the ceiling is a disco ball, and, alongside pictures and books, there are boxes that I imagine are filled with the innermost thoughts and feelings of her subjects. Since the early 1980s, Calle has made a name for herself with art that is at once intimate and detached, morbid and playful, immersing us in the lives of others – and in her own life, too. With a camera and a notebook in hand, she has invited strangers to sleep in her bed, posed as a hotel maid to document the belongings of guests, and called everyone in a lost address book to build a peculiarly tender portrait of its owner. Now, at 72, she is about to open her first big show in the UK for nearly two decades.
“I became an artist to seduce my father,” she tells me, matter of fact. He was a doctor and a collector of pop and conceptual art. She was 26 and “very lost”. He wasn’t happy with how she’d been spending her time, hitch-hiking around the world with no money or sense of purpose. When she returned to Paris and peered at the works on his walls, she thought it might please him if she made art too. “I could not paint,” she says, “but I enjoyed writing, and taking photos seemed possible. I did not know what I was doing or where it was going, but I was confident.”
Right away, she started following people. “I did not know what to do with my days,” she explains. “So I thought, ‘Let’s see what other people do with theirs.’ Immediately, I liked the feeling of not having to decide; it was both restful and active.” In 1980, she stalked a man she’d met at a party from Paris to Venice, tracing his movements in time-stamped entries and photographing him in his raincoat as he passed through the twisting city streets, unaware of the woman in the blond wig following just a few steps behind.
Her new exhibition, Something Missing? at Turner Contemporary in Margate, brings together photographs, videos and installations from 1986 to 2024. It is about absence: Calle’s late parents, a former lover, discarded ideas. When her mother was dying in her bed in 2006, the artist made a film about it, apparently so she wouldn’t miss her last breath. Turning it into a project helped her emotionally, she says. “When I am in a difficult or sad situation, I need to create some distance so that I am not swallowed by the event.”
When her father died in 2015, she decided to stop making art, because she thought it would be nice “for sentimental reasons” if he’d seen everything she’d done. “I went travelling,” says Calle. “Then I got bored and started again.”
As well as absence, Calle tells me she is obsessed with death: “I speak of it more and more because I am getting closer and closer.” She has already commissioned her headstone, and she once commissioned an obituary, which (of course) she then edited. In 2023, she compiled a new series of unfinished works. These will feature in the Margate show, to give them life while she’s still here. She says that some ideas are abandoned because they’re not good enough or would be impossible to pull off. And some require too much time and money. “Sometimes I think an idea is too cruel and not worth that cruelty,” she says, before smiling and adding: “Sometimes I do cruel things and it is worth it.”
Before making one of her most moving series, 1986’s The Blind, Calle worried that the project might be cruel. It involved asking people born without sight to describe their image of beauty. But then the first man she approached answered her simply and clearly. “In a way, he gave me permission.” Black-and-white portraits of the participants are paired with their responses, which include the colour green, the actor Alain Delon, and sheep. Twenty-five years later, she invited people living in Istanbul to see the sea for the first time: Voir la Mer captures Turkish men, women and children on film, first from behind, then as they turn to face the camera, their eyes bright with emotion.
Calle doesn’t do regrets: “There are projects I would like to have done, but I did others instead.” While she remains preoccupied with seeing and being seen, she is no longer interested in the same things that stirred her imagination as a young artist. “I would not follow somebody I do not know for days and days, partly because I do not have the energy,” she says. “You know, I have concerns now that I did not have when I was 26.” She is well aware that she has detractors as well as admirers; that some see her work as inventive, others as invasive. She used to be afraid of running out of ideas, but not any more. “If they stop coming, it won’t be a big deal. I have plenty to do. I will enjoy life.”
Which isn’t to say that she’s fearless. When Calle was first invited to do a show at the Picasso Museum in Paris, she refused because she was worried about being crushed by the modernist master, and it was only after seeing his paintings covered up during the pandemic that the prospect of exhibiting alongside him seemed manageable.
Hastily hidden to protect them from dust and light, his greatest works became less awe-inspiring, more amusing, like lovers the morning after, self-consciously hunched beneath rumpled sheets. “I was afraid of being crushed by Picasso, but I wasn’t afraid of his absence – that gave me a new direction.” In 2023, she took over four floors of the museum and moved in her personal belongings. “Everything that’s here was there,” she says, gesturing around her apartment. “I lived in the show.”
Aside from her spell bunking with Picasso, Calle has always lived alone. “I don’t really like couples,” she tells me, adding in the same breath that she’s been seeing the same man for the past 25 years. “I think most of the time people who are in a couple are much more fun when they go out by themselves.” She’s never made work about her partner, who convinced her to sign an agreement stating that, if she ever does create art about him, he has to leave her. “So, it is an easy out if ever I want to be single again,” she says, with a laugh.
In the past, she has spoken about feeling sorry for people who have children. Does she still feel that way? “It is not a reasonable thing to say, but it is how I feel. I am sure some people are incredibly happy and were not before. And maybe I am being defensive because I can’t change my mind now, so I may as well stick to it and keep pretending even to myself that I made the right decision.” Not the answer I was expecting from a woman with no regrets. She smiles as if she can read my mind. “But I do think I made the right decision. I like the feeling that nobody depends on me.”
Which brings us back to her obsession. Could it be, I ask, preparing myself for another rebuttal, that she is drawn to absence because, as with the lack of dependents, it leaves ample time and space for her to create? She nods, sort of, before going off on a curious and revealing tangent. “I don’t tell the truth,” she says, referring back to the film she made about her mother, and how she plugged the gap she deliberately carved out between them. “I tell what has happened, but what has happened is not the truth. The truth has a before, an after, context.” I search her shaded eyes for a sign, but she is poker-faced.