In 1979, Sophie Calle follows a stranger in the street.
She doesn’t know him. She won’t speak to him. She photographs him from a distance, notes his movements, reconstructs his day. When he disappears into the metro, she loses him… and starts again with someone else. This project would be called “Suite Venitienne” when, a few months later, she runs into this stranger by chance at a party, learns he is leaving for Venice, and decides to follow him there for two weeks. Without his knowledge.
What could seem disturbing becomes, through Sophie Calle’s gaze, a poetic investigation into otherness. Who are the people we cross paths with without seeing? What do you learn about a stranger when you observe them without interacting? The constraint is simple, almost childlike… and what it reveals is vertiginous.
Sophie Calle doesn’t choose her subjects at random. She imposes them upon herself by protocol. She gets hired as a chambermaid in a Venetian hotel to photograph guests’ personal belongings during their absence. She asks strangers to entrust her with their last night of sleep, then she sleeps in their bed. She asks people blind from birth what beauty means to them, what colour is… and their answers are among the most beautiful definitions of the image one could ever read.
In “The Hotel”, in “The Sleepers”, in “The Blind”… the structure is always the same. A protocol of access to the other. A rule of the game set in advance, respected to the end. The constraint is not an artistic pretext. It’s the device that makes the encounter possible, that frames it, that gives it form.
This is exactly what OuViePo seeks to reproduce in the Relationship domain. Not the spontaneous, improvised, natural relationship… but the relationship built by a constraint. Following someone for an hour without speaking to them. Photographing the faces of ten strangers with their permission. Sending an anonymous letter to someone you don’t dare approach. The constraint creates the conditions for an encounter that would not have happened otherwise.
What Sophie Calle says, without ever formulating it directly, is that the other is a material… just like paint, stone or light. Not an object to manipulate, but a territory to explore, with respect, with curiosity, with a protocol solid enough for the encounter to be real.
OuViePo owes her a great deal. Perhaps more than to any other artist.