Sophie Calle has squatted in an abandoned Parisian hotel, worked as a nosy chambermaid, and followed an unsuspecting stranger across Venice—all to create uncanny works with the pulse of detective stories.
Her artistic career began with a kind of sleepwalking. In 1978, Sophie Calle spent her days strolling Paris. She had just returned to France after seven years of travel. Like so many artists and writers before her, she walked the French capital. On one of her ambles, she noticed a door ajar. It opened into an abandoned hotel connected to the former Orsay train station. It was as if she had drifted into a dream. She wandered the empty building and then left, taking note to come back. That year, Calle started making the work that she would become known for: following people, inviting them to sleep in her bed while she photographed them, taking on personas. A year later, she returned to Orsay. The building had remained abandoned. Calle took
