Sophie Calle, Ma mère aimait qu’on parle d’elle
Wilson Saplana Gallery, Copenhagen
12th August – 12th October 2024
Credit: © Sophie Calle, Mama (dans le vase) n°3, 2012. Courtesy of the artist & Perrotin.
In her 1986 essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, Ursula K. Le Guin renounces the archaic hero’s story of the hunter gatherer – the man who fires his weapon into the brain of the mammoth and returns as the spear-wielding conqueror – the ‘killer story’ as she calls it, celebrated right back to prehistoric cave paintings.
Le Guin notes how this hero’s narrative has come to define culture as the origin and elaborator of the weapon and she writes,
I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks, spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news.
Before the arrow, Le Guin tells us, was the container. The story of the basket we would fill with oats, the sling in which we carried the child, so we could free both our hands to empty the husk of its bounty. Preceding the story of the hunter gatherer, human kind lived this way, our survival contained in the basket we would fill, the jar of berries we stored for winter, the medicine we kept in a bundle.
What Le Guin points to is how the power of one story – the traditional hero’s tale of danger, battle, blood and victory has defined the idea of what it is to be a seen, valuable human being;
they were human, fully human, bashing, sticking, thrusting, killing. Wanting to be human too, I sought for evidence that I was; but if that's what it took, to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all. That's right, they said. What you are is a woman.
So, we learn that two tales exist. And each tells us of a way in which to move through and belong in the world; the first is the celebrated narrative of the weapon-wielding masculine figure who ventures out, makes his killing and his mark wherever he passes through. The second - culturally defined as feminine – harvests the husks for oats, collects them in her bag. This is the narrative of the gatherer minus her hunt and Le Guin calls this the life story, the untold narrative whose origins cannot be traced back to the weapon but to a carrier bag filled with tiny grains of things smaller than a mustard seed, and intricately woven nets which when laboriously unknotted are seen to contain one blue pebble […]
Recently, I have been thinking more about stories, how they teach us of our worth and our belonging. Over time I have gathered my own teachers. Le Guin, Rebecca Solnit, Ocean Vuong, Anne Carson; writers of the second tale who differ greatly in their practices, but all serve as gathering points – their stories acting as containers where various narrative seeds assemble. Theirs are tales of intersections, hybrid spaces where the self and the world meet. They don’t require a weapon, don’t look for the kill. Rather, they are created by hands that carefully unknot those intricately woven nets to reveal the blue pebble, the life story. And my teachers have their counterparts in visual arts too. For me these count women such as Carolee Schneemann, Rebecca Horn and the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle whose exhibition “Ma mère aimait qu’on parle d’elle” (My mother enjoyed being talked about) is currently showing at the Wilson Saplana Gallery in Copenhagen.
One way to describe Calle’s catalogue would be as a body of work made from photography, installation, conceptual art and writing – each artistic practice a thread amongst the threads that make up the container, the bag. Wilson Saplana is not the big bag of a world-renowned museum. The container here is smaller, presenting a total of 14 works. But the gallery has, by way of its co-owner Christina Wilson, a long-standing collaborative history with Calle and serves beautifully as gathering space for the pieces. The works have been chosen by Calle herself from a catalogue covering nearly two decades of her artistic practice.
As the title points to, Calle’s gathering of works form an exhibition which concerns the life and death of her mother Monique. But Calle knows that the life story isn’t the traditional hero’s story. She cannot hunt it down and fix it to the canvas with her spear - “Ma mère aimait qu’on parle d’elle” isn’t that linear kind of killer story. Instead, Calle circles the centre of Monique, piecing together a hybrid narrative made of video, texts, found objects, photographs, journals.
The exhibition opens with Calle’s Pole Nord from 2009, a suite comprising a collation of video, texts and photographic works. The suite documents Calle’s journey to the North Pole, no spear but a bag-in-hand containing Monique’s portrait and jewels. Here, in the snow at the foot of the Northern Glacier, Calle buries the objects that circle her mother’s life so they over time will be swallowed by the glacier. It may be a burial without a body, but Monique’s portrait. diamond ring and necklace will slowly mix with the stones, air bubbles, plants and other artefacts that make up the bones of a large moving body of ice.
Sophie Calle Pole Nord/North Pole 2009. Credit: David Stjernholm. Courtesy of Wilson Saplana Gallery.
Other works circle Monique more directly – a collation of journal entries “Morte de bonne humeur” from 2013, provides glimpses into her state of mind and the relationship between artist and mother – take an entry from December 28, 1985 “No use investing in the tenderness of my children, between Antoine’s placid indifference and Sophie’s selfish arrogance!” or extracts from her entry April 1 1990 “No, I’m not depressed, nor bitter, but I am terribly bored, without purpose or project or vision”, ”I feel that I am just a ruined tomb in which my virtues and illusions lie.” The entries are paired with a photograph of a younger Monique bathing in the ocean, a wave of youth and carelessness rolling across her face as a wave rolls over her body. The contrast between image and text underlines the distance between these two points in time – a short one perhaps to the slow moving body of a glacier, but a long one in the body and psyche of one woman.
Credit: ©Sophie Calle, Morte de bonne humeur/Dead in a Good Mood, 2013. Courtesy of the artist & Perrotin
There are works which orbit Monique at a greater distance. A series of photographs placed inside ornate, almost coffin-like, frames depict the tombstones of unnamed mothers and examines motherlessness as a universal state. Others go as close up as possible before death makes its entry – “Faire Part” from 2012 depicts Monique’s feet as she receives the last rites – or in this case, her final pedicure – the day before her passing, while the sculpture “Souci (32)” from 2010, a hard silvery plaque of sanded lead leaf speaks her final word – noticeably one of softness – “Souci”, “Ne vous faites pas de souci” – ‘Don’t worry’.
As an exhibition in its entirety, “Ma mère aimait qu’on parle d’elle” is an act of careful harvesting – moments in time, objects, different art forms – from two decades of selected work. Wilson Saplana Gallery acts as the container and cross point for Calle’s artistic practices and while the works document a venturing out into disciplines and the world at large, the movement through them is marked by a gathering rather than a conquering quality. There is no ‘killer’ image of death, nothing of a sensationalising quality. Instead the selected pieces in the exhibition are, as Le Guin might have described them, ‘things smaller than a mustard seed, and intricately woven nets’. This ‘smallness’ and intricacy do not render the works small – rather, the emotional and artistic scale of “Ma mère aimait qu’on parle d’elle” bears witness to Calle’s magnificence. She knows the value of the seed, how to gather it and make its existence in the world visible.
Wilson Saplana Gallery, Copenhagen, 12th August – 12th October 2024