Who’s watching who ? Sophie Calle’s world.

Sophie Calle doesn’t make art so much as she slips under the doorframe and rifles through the nightstand. Every project is a dare: privacy versus curiosity, stage versus backstage, your heartbeat versus her lens.

Take La Filature (1981). Calle ropes in a private detective (hired through her own mother, because why not twist the knife) to tail her for a day. He files neat surveillance notes; she keeps her own raw diary of being hunted. When the two sets of evidence hang side-by-side, the gallery becomes a hall of mirrors: who’s got the power, the watcher or the watched?

Or The Hotel. Calle signs on as a chambermaid, camera tucked beneath fresh towels, cataloguing the stray love letters, the half-eaten fruit, the toothbrush grime of total strangers. She turns housekeeping into archeology, handling dust as dating data.

Then there’s Take Care of Yourself. One breakup email. Calle forwards it to 107 women,  Lawyers, actresses, a parrot trainer, even a couple of wooden mannequins, and asks them to shred it, sing it, litigate it, annotate it. Heartbreak becomes a chorus, and the ex’s tidy sign-off mutates into an anthem of collective rebuttal.

What drives her? A stubborn itch to see what society labels off-limits. She exposes not just her subjects but our shared appetite for the keyhole view. Proof that the line between confession and spectacle keeps sliding in the age of livestream everything.

That riot of curiosity syncs with Rat d’Hôtel’s own pulse: kick the “Do Not Disturb” sign, push inside, see what stories are hiding in the linens. Calle reminds us that trespass can be tender, voyeurism can be critique, and sometimes the fastest way to understand a moment is to crack it open and let everyone read the mail.

written by Amer Chamaa