Calle's seminal 1979 series of people sleeping in her bed: now in English
In one of Sophie Calle's first artistic experiments, she invited friends, acquaintances and strangers to sleep in her bed.
Twenty-seven people agreed, 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.
Unlike the original installation, this artist's book version of The Sleepers contains not only all the photographs and captions but also her engrossing, novellalike narrative, untranslated until now. From the single, liminal mise-en-scène of her bedroom, Calle reports in text and photos, as if in real time, as sleepers arrive, talk, sleep, eat and leave.