Certain places, certain people. Sophie Calle, for example. I was terrified before I met her (I knew she was capable of anything), but her permanent joy lately has erased some of my fear.
Certain places. The Picasso of Paris, for example. The museum where, two years ago, Sophie set up her exhibition Toi de faire, but little (It’s your turn, honey), where he attaches, as an attachment, a succession of “mural paintings” in which he describes a good number of artistic actions that remained unfinished.
One of these, to name just one, was the one generated by a press release, coming from Coulogne, in Pas de Calais. The four members of the Demeester family – an early pensioner and his 55-year-old wife, his 30-year-old son and daughter – were found hanging on their terrace. The autopsy confirmed their simultaneous deaths without signs of violence. They left this note:
“We were too wrong. I’m sorry.”
Although Sophie had planned an artistic action in which she would investigate the motives behind each of the four suicides, she quickly realized that nothing could match the mystery surrounding that suicide note. And there it ended – it was a dead end – the project which, in reality, had not even begun.
Your incomplete projects consist of Catalog raisonné of the unfinishedthe book which, published this year in Paris, brings together the entire inventory of artistic attempts which, because they lack definitive closures, create, as we read the book, an atmosphere, a general impression of incompleteness.
But incompleteness doesn’t have to be a setback, it can be very creative. After all, it is still a part of the work and something inherent, moreover, to the construction of any work of art. You can prove it simply by seeing how each episode of Sophie’s inventory of the unfinished, each artistic intervention commented on by the Catalogin some way it encourages the reader to continue – both in life and in writing – the interrupted attempt.
In reality, the book’s suspended initiatives awaken a desire for continuity. The reader, perhaps enraptured by the charm of what is narrated and not closed, may wonder if the Catalog Sophie’s work does not arise from an approach to Renaissance technique not finished. I am obviously speaking of the active reader, who can discover in the “unfinished” of the “mural paintings” a feeling of stability and paradoxically also of vitality, of a future for all those texts that seemed defeated.
He is a reader who is surprised when he realizes that he has been included, more and more, in a process of continuous change of pace, of acceleration, of impulses: a process that encourages him to see a future horizon within a chain of transmission of abandoned ideas. And it is a reader, moreover, who already at this moment perceives that Sophie (who knows she is capable of anything) could approach to whisper in his ear, as if it were a moment of triumph and optimism:
— It’s your turn, darling.
