Publisher: Siglio, ISBN: 9781938221347, Author: Sophie Calle, Format: 20.3 x 15.2 cm, 304pp
In one of Sophie Calle’s first artistic experiments, she invited friends, acquaintances and strangers to sleep in her bed. This artist’s book version of 'The Sleepers' contains not only all the photographs and captions presented in the 1979 exhibition, but also her engrossing narrative – untranslated until now. Calle reports in text and photos as sleepers arrive, talk, sleep, eat & leave. Their sometimes startling, sometimes endearing particularities merge into something akin to an eight-day-long dream.Twenty-seven people agreed to sleep in Calle's bed — among them a baker, a babysitter, an actor, a journalist, a seamstress, a trumpet player and three painters. Calle photographed them awake and asleep, secretly recording any private conversations once the door closed. She served each a meal, and, if they agreed, she subjected them to a questionnaire that probed their personal predilections, habits and dreams as well as their interpretations of the act of sleeping in her bed: a curiosity, a game, an artwork, or—as Calle intended it—a job. The result, comprising her first exhibition in 1979, was a grid of 198 photographs and short texts. Many seeds of Calle’s subsequent works are embedded in 'The Sleepers': her exacting and transgressive methods of investigation, her cultivation of intimacy and remove, and her unrelenting curiosity. In this work, as she observes the sleepers, they observe her too—with reciprocal candor. 'The Sleepers', clothbound and pillow-like, unfolds as it opens, inviting the reader to join the others in Calle’s bed.