In December 1978, Sophie Calle, 25, returned to Paris after her activist wanderings across the planet. During her wanderings in the capital, she comes across a small door leading to the Grand Hotel Palais d’Orsay, abandoned for five years, and which she does not know is preparing to become a museum. She enters and discovers “a monumental staircase, five floors, a ballroom, kitchens, long corridors serving more than two hundred and fifty rooms”.
Shortly after, she follows in the footsteps of a man in Venice, a spinning mill whose story she transcribes into images and words (Venetian suite), before inviting strangers to sleep in his bed (The Sleepers). In April, the young artist “reconnected” with Orsay: “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.”
Sophie Calle, Orsay, 2021.
© François Deladerrière
This is how the adventure of room 501 takes shape. Sophie Calle occupies it for entire days to train in the art of the whirling dervishes with whom Bob Wilson works, whose troupe she dreams of joining. She also explores the abandoned hotel, photographing every nook and cranny and collecting relics: enameled red metal plaques with room numbers, rusty doorbells, water and gas readings, guest sheets from 1937 to 1940, or written messages in red ink addressed to the handyman of the establishment, who, according to the senders, is called Oddo, Addo, Odo or even Mr Audau.
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“Oddo, the lock on room 208 that you fixed the other day still doesn’t work. […]. The night valet failed to open. See that.” Of this mysterious factotum Sophie Calle will later seek, in vain, the trace. And continues to haunt the place until 1981, in spite of the workers who work on the ground floor and gradually gain the floors as and as the renovation work progresses.
His photographs and the “loot” seized during his clandestine prospecting are now the subject of an exhibition presented at the Musée d’Orsay until June 12 on the premises of the former hotel. Sophie Calle invites the archaeologist and prehistorian Jean-Paul Demoule who dissects, with a meticulous distance and a share of futuristic imagination not devoid of humor, the objects and documents collected. At the same time, a book is published by Actes Sud, The elevator occupies the 501 which retraces the saga of the photographer-detective-author within the debris of the Grand Hôtel Palais d’Orsay. Because room 501 no longer exists. An elevator replaced it.
Sophie Calle, Orsay, 2021.
© François Deladerrière
The hanging and the work, real investigative notebooks, are part of the visual artist’s long-term work. A singular, addictive practice, combining writing and image in the service of an intimate narration. Here, Sophie Calle superimposes the ghosts of the past and the present by confronting her loot with the masterpieces kept at the Musée d’Orsay: “Au Moulin de la Galettethe parquet planers and the little fourteen-year-old dancer has lunch on the grass with Olympia and still discuss the origin of the world when, on the poppiesgrave the starry Night…”. And, further on, facing the Great Winter by Cuno Amiet: “The curator reveals to me that one day the character lost his two companions, buried under the snow by the artist, and that, if you turn the canvas over, you can discern their ghosts on the back of the painting. ON THE BACK.. .As a sign of Oddo, Odo, Mr Audau, my ghost of Orsay.”
