Returning on the artist’s steps… This is what the musée d'Orsay offers from March 15 to June 12, 2022, with an exhibition focusing on Sophie Calle’s work called “Les Fantômes d'Orsay”. It focuses on the period the artist stayed within the deserted hôtel d’Orsay before the renovation work started to turn the station into a museum. In her abandoned bedroom, room 501, Sophie Calle feels “the place’s desolation like an archeological site where everything has been neglected”.

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She then takes pictures, gathers documents, items, customers’ details, notes to a hotel employee called Oddo, and invents a universe, her “ghosts” she got inspired for her artistic work. It is in the 2020 lockdown that she got the idea of an exhibition on the traces of her past. A genuine quest “to find the key of an unresolved enigma that was found in her symbol Oddo’s figure”.

Photographs, items, customers’ details… Plenty of materials displayed for visitors so they can discover the “personal tracks of the experience lived by Sophie Calle and all those who stayed there, worked there of which she collected minor but moving signs”. Items that become “excavation items, and ready-made, traces from a past so close in time and yet so far”. A total masterpiece to discover if you love photographs!