The hotel
Description
A forensic conceptualist's inventory of the ordinary and extraordinary lives in a Venetian hotel
In 1981 Sophie Calle took a job as a chambermaid for the Hotel C in Venice, Italy. Stashing her camera and tape recorder in her mop bucket, she not only cleans and tidies, but sorts through the evidence of the hotel guests' lives. Assigned 12 rooms on the fourth floor, she surveys the state of the guests' bedding, their books, newspapers and postcards, perfumes and cologne, traveling clothes and costumes for Carnival. She methodically photographs the contents of closets and suitcases, examining the detritus in the rubbish bin and the toiletries arranged on the washbasin. She discovers their birth dates and blood types, diary entries, letters from and photographs of lovers and family. She eavesdrops on arguments and love-making. She retrieves a pair of shoes from the wastebasket and takes two chocolates from a neglected box of sweets, while leaving behind stashes of money, pills and jewelry. Her thievery is the eye of the camera, observing the details that were not meant for her, or us, to see.The Hotel now manifests as a book for the first time in English (it was previously included in the book Double Game). Collaborating with the artist on a new design that features enhanced and larger photographs, and pays specific attention to the beauty of the book as an object, Siglio is releasing its third book authored by Calle, after The Address Book (2012) and Suite Vénitienne (2015).Sophie Calle (born 1953) is an internationally renowned artist whose controversial works often fuse conceptual art and Oulipo-like constraints, investigatory methods and the plundering of autobiography. The Whitechapel Gallery in London organized a retrospective in 2009, and her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hayward Gallery and Serpentine, London; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. She lives and works in Paris.
More Details
9781938221293
Published Reviews
Publisher's Weekly Review
The reader unwittingly becomes the accomplice in this beguiling work from artist Calle (The Address Book). When she took a job in 1981 as a chambermaid at a hotel in Venice, Italy, Calle did it less with the intention of cleaning messes and more with a desire to document them. With a hidden camera and tape recorder in tow, she spent three weeks cobbling together the stories of the hotel's guests, rummaging through suitcases, diaries, wallets, and closets, assessing unmade beds and conversations heard through the walls. In Calle's world, privacy is an illusion and she whimsically disregards it, treating each room like a crime scene and diligently taking inventory of each occupant's belongings. "The brown raincoat is no longer in the wardrobe (it's raining)," she notes on her second day in Room 47. She surmises guests' reasons for visiting (honeymooners, partiers, businessmen); steals chocolate from Room 43 and a sip of the dregs of a Coca-Cola from another; and occasionally feels moved, letting herself get carried away in a fantasy after reading a love letter: "I imagine for a few seconds a patron... telling me to drop everything and go away with him, to Paris perhaps." While decidedly illicit, there's something benign, even curiously charming, about the way Calle studies her subjects. This is a gem. (Nov.)
PW Annex Reviews
The reader unwittingly becomes the accomplice in this beguiling work from artist Calle (The Address Book). When she took a job in 1981 as a chambermaid at a hotel in Venice, Italy, Calle did it less with the intention of cleaning messes and more with a desire to document them. With a hidden camera and tape recorder in tow, she spent three weeks cobbling together the stories of the hotel's guests, rummaging through suitcases, diaries, wallets, and closets, assessing unmade beds and conversations heard through the walls. In Calle's world, privacy is an illusion and she whimsically disregards it, treating each room like a crime scene and diligently taking inventory of each occupant's belongings. "The brown raincoat is no longer in the wardrobe (it's raining)," she notes on her second day in Room 47. She surmises guests' reasons for visiting (honeymooners, partiers, businessmen); steals chocolate from Room 43 and a sip of the dregs of a Coca-Cola from another; and occasionally feels moved, letting herself get carried away in a fantasy after reading a love letter: "I imagine for a few seconds a patron... telling me to drop everything and go away with him, to Paris perhaps." While decidedly illicit, there's something benign, even curiously charming, about the way Calle studies her subjects. This is a gem. (Nov.)
Copyright 2021 Publishers Weekly Annex.