The Sleepers

Le livre

In one of Sophie Calle's first artistic experiments, she invited friends, acquaintances, and strangers to sleep in her bed. Twenty-seven people agreed, among them a baker, a babysitter, an actor, a journalist, a seamstress, a trumpet player, and several painters. Calle photographed them awake and asleep, secretly recording any private conversation once the door closed. She served each a meal, and, if they agreed, subjected them to a questionnaire that probed their personal predilections, habits, and dreams, as well as their interpretations of the act of sleeping in her bed: was it a curiosity, a game, a seduction, an artwork, a job? The result, comprising her first exhibition in 1979, was a grid of 198 photographs and brief texts. Unlike the original installation, this artist's book iteration of The Sleepers contains not only all the photographs and captions but also her engrossing, novella-like report that Calle narrates from the single, liminal mise-en-scène of her bedroom. The sleepers are chronicled in text and photos, as if in real time, as they inhabit the bed, along with their answers to Calle's candid questioning. The Sleepers is as much an outré report on the nature and act of sleeping as it is something akin to an eight-day-long dream. Many seeds of Calle's subsequent works are embedded in The Sleepers: her exacting and transgressive methods of investigation, her cultivation of intimacy and remove, and her generative and unrelenting curiosity. But in this work, as she observes the sleepers, they observe her too: they speak with reciprocal candor, presaging her insouciance and resolve as she detonates boundaries in her later work. As the complete work of The Sleepers has been published only in France, Siglio commissioned lauded translator Emma Ramadan to render this work into English for the first time.