When Sophie Calle’s boyfriend wrote her a breakup letter by email, little did he know, it would be inspiration for her 2009 exhibition “Take Care of Yourself”.
“Take Care of Yourself” 2009 is a retrospective of her work from the 1980’s to the present. The work mainly concentrates on the break up letter she received from a lover. Once Calle collected herself, she consulted 107 different professional women, all experts in their particular field, to examine and extract notions from the text and respond to them by using their own personal skills.
It would be amiss to write about this project without first reading a translation of the now infamous letter, sent by the man we shall refer to as X. Calle goes on to say
“received an email telling me it was over.
I didn’t know how to respond.
It was almost as if it hadn’t been meant for me.
It ended with the words, “Take care of yourself.”
And so I did.
I asked 107 women (including two made from wood and one with feathers),
chosen for their profession or skills, to interpret this letter.
To analyze it, comment on it, dance it, sing it.
Dissect it. Exhaust it. Understand it for me.
Answer for me.
It was a way of taking the time to break up.
A way of taking care of myself.
Sophie,”
I have been meaning to write and reply to your last email for a while. At the same time,
I thought it would be better to talk to you and tell you what I have to say outloud.
Still, at least it will be written.
As you have noticed, I have not been quite right recently. As if I no longer recognized myself in my own existence. A terrible feeling of anxiety, which I cannot really fight, other than keeping on going to try and overtake it, as I have always done. When we met, you laid down one condition: not to become the “fourth”. I stood by that promise: it has been months now since I have seen the “others,”because i obviously could find no way of seeing them without making you one of them.
I thought that would be enough, I thought that loving you and your love would be enough so that this anxiety – which constantly drives me to look further afield and which meens that I will never feel quiet and at rest or probably even just happy or “generous”- would be calmed when I was with you, with the certainty that the love you have for me was the best for me, the best I have ever had , you know that. I thought that my writing would be a remedy, that my “disquiet” would dissolve into it so that i could find you. But no. Infact it even became worse, I cannot even tell you the sort of state I feel I am in. so I started calling the “others” again this week.
And i know what that means to me and the cycle that it will drag me into.
I have never lied to you and I do not intend to start lying now.
There was another rule that you laid down at the beginning of our affair: the day we
stopped being lovers you would no longer be able to envisage seeing me. You know this
constraint can only ever strike me as disastrous, and unjust (when you still see B. and K. …)
and understandable (obviously…); so I can never become your friend.
But now you can gauge how significant my decision is from the fact that I am prepared to bend to your will, even though there are so many things – not seeing you or talking to you or catching the way you look at people and things, and your gentleness towards me – that I will miss terribly.
Whatever happens, remember that I will always love you in the same way, my own way, that I have ever since I first met you; that it will carry on within me and, I am sure, will never die.
But it would be the worst kind of masquerade to prolong a situation now when you know as well as I do; it has become irreparable by the standards of the very love I have for you and
you have for me a love which is now forcing me to be so frank with you, as final proof of what
happened between us and will always be unique.
I would have liked things to have turned out differently.
Take care of yourself. (yourself., 2007.)
Much like Bryony Campbells “The Dad Project” which we touched on earlier in this course, Calle takes a moment of pain and turns that turmoil, that inner anguish, Into art. This is something worthy of admiration, especially from me, I tend to shy away from the camera when I’m feeling down or lacking confidence, the last thing I think about is picking up a camera and creating a project with the pain or discomfort, I, if anything , opt for a break from the lens.
Calle immerses herself, almost drowns herself in the heartache, uses it as a form of therapy, probably prolonging the experience but giving great catharsis. Not only does she use this work for her own therapy as Sean O’hagan refers to in his piece for the Guardian, “This is art not so much as self-therapy, but as a way of holding up a mirror to human behaviour as it is tested and sometimes unmoored by desire and obsession” (12.00, 2017)
Calle subjects the words and text to an almost forensic level of investigation, although the words are the most important part of this exhibition, they are not her words, they are everybody else’s. The others are giving her a voice when she could not find her own. Even when her anguish over the breakup is over, the project continues, the only fear that the project might end with a reconciliation.
Calle goes on to say in another Guardian article “At first it was therapy; then art took over. “After I month I felt better. There was no suffering. It worked. The project had replaced the man.” (Chrisafis, 2007)
This is a powerful, if not overwhelming body of work. I challenge anybody to view all 106 elements; 7 films, 33 films and prints, 57 prints and texts, 6 wide paper texts and 5 small films and prints in one sitting. The original email helps relay the narrative of this project, as Roland Barthes says in his 1967 essay ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ “Image and text bounce off each other to create a fuller picture that allows for ambiguity and various interpretations.” (Barthes, 1977 ) all of this firmly falls in line with the fundamentals of a sporadic post modern story.
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