Ghost stories: Sophie Calle at the Museé d’Orsay

In 1978, lost in Paris and in search of her father’s approval, Sophie Calle pushed on the door of the old Gare d’Orsay, and found a haven of grand staircases, long corridors, lavish ballrooms and forgotten stories: the Grand Hôtel Palais d’Orsay, long abandoned. Calle – preoccupied with the detritus that people and places leave behind – returned to the hotel over and over, developing a practice that was seeing her become an artist-archaeologist, a writer-detective. She spent months taking photos and collecting seemingly unimportant objects. Calle was not an artist then, not yet, but her work here represents the very beginnings of her practice in drawing out meanings and significance from otherwise innate objects. She invited friends and spent days there alone, twirling through the grand ballrooms and making a home in Room 501, ‘without a real home, I chose as shelter the remains of a room with a view of the Rue de Lille, at the very end of the corridor on the fifth floor,’ but she alway returned to her father’s house after dark.

The archive grew: red-enamelled rusted room numbers, a selection of hotel guest records from 1937-40, long since irrelevant meter readings, notes addressed to an unknown man named Oddo, accumulated next to photos of empty chairs and peeling wallpaper, dirtied mattresses and dead cats: ‘spoils’ Calle had ‘seized’. Objects were gathered and became artefacts and the traces of Oddo, real but becoming imagined, grew into an obsession. The building was disappearing, but Calle gripped onto the stories it held and created new ones, rummaged through artefacts thought ‘trivial’ and found new lives.

Calle perches on the end of the bed in Room 501. Later, she writes: 'What did I think about as I sat on the bed in room 501? I don’t remember how I spent the days. I was there, waiting for something'

Credit: Richard Baltauss

The 'peculiar object attached to the wall' is either a 'musical instrument used during ceremonies', or just a 'wall-mounted rotary telephone...lacking the now-requisite ground wire'

Credit: Sophie Calle

Forty years later, Calle is a world-famous artist, and she finds an unlikely home at Orsay again, now a gallery usually reserved for impressionist masterpieces. For her exhibition Les Fantômes d’Orsay, or The Ghosts of Orsay (at the Musée d’Orsay until 12th June 2022), she invited archaeologist Jean-Paul Demoule to make sense of her collected archive, and he combed through the endless articles and devised a narrative. On the walls of the gallery, Calle’s ‘true’ story, though in the third person, is presented next to corresponding artefacts and Demoule’s ‘fictional’ story. Calle always tells stories in her work, sometimes even lies, but in this exhibition, her narrative is framed as the truth, while Demoule’s, whose job as an archaeologist is to tell the truth, and write history, is the storyteller. The accounts begin completely detached: Calle’s enamel room numbers become Demoule’s tokens from ‘a game of chance’; the notes she thought to be to the presumed hotel caretaker Oddo, to Demoule appear to be offerings to the mysterious spirit of Oddo that weaves through his narrative. Pausing on a photograph of Calle perched on the bed in Room 501, Demoule asks ‘Is she here because she likes ruins, or has she come to bring the ruin?’ Here, the ‘truthful’ narrative also only raises more questions: ‘Was she aware that she sat among scattered objects, prefiguring what would become an archaeology of herself in forty-two years’ time?’ The autobiographical nature of this work of both fact and fiction builds a picture of what it might be like to be Calle – questioning not just other people’s stories, but also her own.

It was during those early days at Orsay that Calle learnt to document, to stalk people and places and to find what haunts them. In February 1979, shortly after her first encounter with Orsay, Calle met a stranger at a party and followed him to Venice, and Suite Vénitienne, the crucible of her practice in which she fuses fiction and obsessive detective methods, was created as she traced the stranger, known only as Henri B, through Venice and back to Paris. The journey, and its later iterations in exhibition and book format, are ostensibly about him, but they quickly become about Calle herself, revealing her own thoughts and desires, and as she inches closer to being discovered, the chasm between knowing someone and merely following them grows. Calle looks for stories in people’s shadows, the gaps they leave in once-inhabited spaces, and the objects accumulated across an ordinary life. Taking what might be overlooked as boring – or quotidian – Calle feeds epic narratives and theatrical drama into the inconsequential, reimagining them in the prism of her mind.

Demoule posits that it is unlikely that these red-enamelled plates belonged to hotel doors, 'unless the missing numbers correspond to ghost rooms, which would be consistent with the disappearance of the hotel itself'

Credit: François Deladerrière

During France’s second coronavirus lockdown, Calle returned to Orsay, just as ‘present ghosts superimpose themselves on past ghosts’. Dingy photos taken by Calle of torchlit paintings interrupt the exhibition of old artefacts, twisting time around with new images, of paintings created long before Calle or Oddo. Calle was led to Deep Winter by Cuno Amiet, depicting a lone skier, the artist of which once lost two friends, buried in the snow in an accident. On the reverse of the canvas – au dos (‘on the back’) – two figures are hidden from view. ‘AU DOS … like a sign from Oddo, Odo, Mr. Audau, my Orsay ghost’ writes Calle, and the distinction between Calle’s truth and Demoule’s fiction is quickly dissolved.

This is part of Calle’s game: realisations of the unknowability of people and places through deception and trickery. In 1981, Calle took a job as a hotel maid in Venice, and over three weeks she recorded everything she found in the 12 hotel rooms she cleaned. Transcribing postcards and letters (‘Glassware: not bad. Cemetery: fantastic. Gondola ride: worth it.’) and photographing rubbish bins, documenting the contents of wardrobes (‘not silk but nylon’), and making a forensic crime scene of an ordinary room. The resultant work, The Hotel, details all that is curious and all that is commonplace about each room she cleans during her short time there. In 1993, speaking to art critic Bice Curiger, Calle revealed that one of the rooms in The Hotel was curated: ‘everything is true…there was a room I would have liked to find, and this room never appeared. So…I took an empty room and I filled it with what I would have.’ In Calle’s view, what she, or Demoule, or visitors to The Ghosts of Orsay find, is based on what we want to see, and we are all in the practice of seeing something where there is nothing.

‘We only really know each other by the stories we tell and the assumptions we make’

On Calle’s return to Orsay, forty years later, she says: ‘My old territory has become a museum…I find, in an archive, a blueprint of the hotel’s fifth floor with two room 502s side by side. Room 501 has vanished. A ghost room in a ghost hotel.’ The room where Calle made her home is now an emergency staircase and lift core for administrative staff. In a museum of 19th-century art, Demoule asks if the emergency is to escape from the academic and towards the contemporary: ‘Or could it be the opposite? Or, lastly, is it possible that the spirit Oddo was summoned so many times for “emergencies” in this building that he finally decided to transform himself into a staircase, thus becoming the esprit de l’escalier?’ Demoule refers not just to Oddo’s spirit in the staircase, but the saying that references a retort coming to mind, after the opportunity to say it has passed, and the wish to bend time backwards to give it.

It’s from this elevator that a book, published by Actes Sud, accompanying the exhibition takes its name: The Elevator Resides in 501. Resembling case notes, the roughly assembled nature of the book, with inserts and postcards, stories written on tracing paper and overlaying others, builds a feeling of a work in progress. Calle’s work has often translated from experience, to exhibition, to book, seamlessly. The use of a narrative that takes visitors by the hand and leads them into Calle’s world is made to be turned to the page. Her interplay between text and image shows a careful manipulation of the medium, turning art to life, and back again. In Orsay, where Calle’s work both comes to life and unsettles the viewer in its exploitation of the mutable truth, and to be in the building, to walk corridors that Calle and Oddo once walked, to look for an old hotel room, overlooking Rue de Lille and find an elevator, is to be immersed in Calle’s universe, and to become, ourselves, a ghost of Orsay.

Claude Monet's Les Coquelicots is viewed by torchlight, when Calle returns to Orsay during France's second lockdown

Credit: Sophie Calle

The registration forms of some of Orsay's 'ghosts' are displayed in the exhibition against a replica of the hotel's former wallpaper. We are told the name, date and place of birth, place, nationality, profession and home address of some of the guests, in their own handwriting

Credit: Sophie Crépy

The body of work runs a thread through techniques and practices that Calle has honed over many years. Her early and obsessive collection of objects at Orsay seems instinctive, but revisiting this archive after a career spent following people and places, finding stories in the ordinary and creating spectacle from the voyeuristic, the archive is presented with both a forensic precision and a complete lack thereof. We are left to make our own assumptions of the artefacts and their supposed significance. A collection of 90 guest-registration forms were taken by Calle, most of which belonged to people whose names began with the letter D and, less frequently, B. To Demoule, the curious selection ‘calls for further investigation’. In her ‘true’ narrative, Calle gives no explanation for an easily explicable small selection, perhaps snatched from only one section of a rolodex. Calle worked ‘without method’, at this time, though she would go on to set herself arbitrary rules and constraints. The archives through which we write history, Calle shows, are not static. It is in this muddy water that Calle reveals that we only really know each other by the stories we tell and the assumptions we make. Even in the closeness of rifling through personal belongings, there is an essential distance between humans.

The Elevator Resides in Room 501 by Sophie Calle and Jean-Paul Demoule

Calle is concerned with negative space: vacant hotel rooms, the details of long-since dead guests, and notes to a stranger who perhaps never lived. Seeing this catalogue of private and collective experiences, switching from fact to fiction and back again, Calle exposes the texture of a place built from past lives and previous inhabitants, and reveals the shadows and ghosts that we see when we experience a space, and the irrelevance of whether or not these stories we tell ourselves are true.

The exhibition propels its voyeurs back into what is now Musée d’Orsay. On the concourse, the station clock still hangs heavy over our heads but our perception of time is altered. We are left in a present that is quickly becoming part of the past. That’s what Calle’s work does: collapses time and stretches it back out again, pulling at the elastics of a linear time and catapulting them through any division between fact and fiction. Calle’s fantastical readings of everyday objects reveals an understanding that quotidian life is already a work of art. Yet it was the art world at large that decided Calle should be an artist, while she was simply passing time and finding her way in life, and documenting what she saw. What makes Calle’s art – and this exhibition – so seductive, is that she perhaps never really intended for it to be art at all.