Sophie CALLE

In 1978, the Orsay train station and its hotel had been deserted. Construction work on the future museum hadn’t yet begun. It was at that moment that Sophie Calle pushed a door that gave way and chose an abandoned room to take shelter in: Room 501. She spent entire days there, for several months, before her departure for Venice which was to mark the beginning of her future work. During this stay, she felt the desolation of a place, like an archaeological space where everything had been abandoned. She took pictures, invited her friends, collected documents, objects, the records of the people who had stayed in the hotel like so many open lives, the notes addressed to a hotel employee named Oddo, whose identity she imagined. In some respects, Calle developed her method in the Hôtel d'Orsay. 
To this date, she has kept the items captured during her exploration, from a place in the process of disappearing. All these "trophies" - as she calls them - have accompanied her for more than forty years, like so many ghosts from a world that no longer exists. 
During the lockdown, the idea was born for an evocation of the hotel and the museum that had succeeded it. This is how the project The Ghosts of Orsay was born, like a return of the artist to her tracks, a quest into the past to find the key to an unsolved enigma, which found its symbol in the figure of Oddo. 
Sophie Calle thus resumed her journey by returning to confront the hotel and the museum, both brought together in this “return” exhibition.