Original text of the work in French
Translation of the text in English
Introduction :
"At the end of January 1981, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice. I decided to follow him."
Suite Vénitienne, 1980
In 1980, Sophie Calle followed a man she briefly met in Paris to Venice. This shadowing in the Venetian streets resulted in a set of 55 black and white photographs, 23 texts, and 3 maps. Suite Vénitienne illustrates the artist’s characteristic play between fiction and reality, bringing the poetry out of what she calls “an arbitrary situation.” In an essay dedicated to this peculiar performance, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard thus wrote that Sophie Calle explored “the idea that people’s lives are haphazard paths that have no meaning and lead nowhere and which, for that very reason, are “curious.”” For the philosopher, this compilation of texts, photographs, and maps has neither an archivistic ambition nor a voyeuristic one. They rather signal the presence of the follower and the followed, whose selves are mutually erased and become mere traces in the process.
In the beginning of the 1980s, the conceptual artist consistently engaged with the theme of surveillance through her characteristic combination of photographs and texts. Most significantly, in 1981, she asked her mother to hire a private detective to follow her, without telling her when (The Shadow). Once again seeking to capture people’s traces, Sophie Calle, who was hired as a maid in a venetian hotel, where she photographed and meticulously described the empty rooms and the personal belongings of their inhabitants (The Hotel, 1981).