In 1978, Sophie Calle returned to Paris after seven years of travel, beginning a period of aimless wandering that would define her career as a conceptual artist. During one of these ambles, she discovered a door left ajar at the abandoned hotel connected to the former Orsay train station. What she found inside was a frozen world of dust and discarded documents—a liminal space that she would eventually occupy as a squatter in room 501.
While living in the decaying station, Calle began developing the methodologies of chance and surveillance that became her signature. She spent her days following strangers through the city and inviting acquaintances to sleep in her bed while she photographed them, treating the abandoned hotel as a private laboratory for the interrogation of public and private boundaries. She collected artifacts and took photographs of the station's slow decay, unaware that the structure would eventually be transformed into one of the world's most prestigious museums.
Nearly forty years later, at a dinner party, Calle revealed her secret history to Donatien Grau, the head of contemporary programs at the Musée d’Orsay. The revelation that she had once lived illegally within the very walls that now house masterpieces by Monet and Van Gogh highlights the cyclical nature of urban space. Her early "sleepwalking" through the ruins of Orsay was not merely a bohemian exercise, but a foundational act of adaptive reuse, where the artist claimed the city’s discarded architecture as a site for intellectual production.
With reporting from Aperture.
Source · Aperture
