Rachel, Monique

On the tombstone of Sophie Calle's mother, at the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris, we can read this epitaph: “I'm already bored”. It is undoubtedly the worst thing that could happen to this woman, whose life was filled with adventures and who is now “finally”, to use her own exclamation, in the centre of a project created by her daughter. Sophie Calle has made, for years now, her daily life, her encounters and the random events of her life, the subjects of a multiform work. But in fact it is the first time that she is inviting the figure of her mother into an artistic proposal, mixing installation and performance. Composed of photos, videos, personal objects and short texts, Rachel, Monique, an allusion to her mother's numerous names – is the account of an affective link that can no longer be shown by anything other than this exhibition of intimacy. And it is by going to the most intimate part of this intimacy, by following these often discreet traces, that we are linked to our own deceased, our own separations, our own mourning. By presenting, without the slightest uncalled-for voyeurism, the film of her mother's last moments, Sophie Calle makes us feel the elusive instant of the passage to that mysterious beyond, and asserts, with strength and delicacy, that death must be neither hidden, nor disposed of. After a first presentation at the Palais de Tokyo in 2010, she has redesigned this exhibition for the Église des Célestins, where she has also chosen to read the diaries that her mother had entrusted to her: 16 notebooks for 16 discontinuous years, from 1981 to 2000. She will discover, alone, these texts that she does not know and will read them when she wants to, without any warning. Occasionally, with the public, she will therefore share these words that were kept secret for so long by this mother who was “not fooled”, who had offered them to her clearly suspecting that, one day, they would take part in the work that her daughter was constructing. JFP

conception Sophie Calle

production ARTER/APC+AIA
coproduction Festival d'Avignon, Palais de Tokyo
with the support of the Galerie Perrotin, the Fondation Luma and of the Louis Roederer Foundation