Calle’s work is herself. She stages herself, her life, her world and presents it to us. 

One part of Sophie’s work that is fascinating to me is how she gives a story to complete stranger. In the TV-show Grey’s Anatomy, April Kepner finds herself facing a gun and she starts blabbing about her personal life. Later on, after the shooter lets her go, she tells her friend that she’s seen this program on TV that explained her that if you give a killer personal information about yourself, it’ll create empathy for you in his mind and he’ll be less likely to shoot you. This relates really well to Calle’s work I feel. She tells us about the lives of complete strangers. Shares trivial facts about them, things we probably have already experience in our daily-life, and just like that, she makes us relate to someone we never met. Telling us we're the same than this anonymous guy sitting next to us on the tube.

I feel like the reason our society is radicalising lately, with Trump’s election, Brexit, xenophobia towards refugees is because people don’t identify to one another. You don’t realise that you are one war away from being that man on a crowded boat, one layoff away from being that woman under the bridge,… Sophie Calle’s work gives names and lives to countless faceless people that live alongside us, and makes us look up in the train and wonder what is that person’s life like? Therefore, when they’ll accidentally step on your foot, you’ll be more likely to smile than to scoff. By giving random passerby stories, she humanises them and I think that it does a great deal to improve tolerance in our society. Once you have been forced to acknowledge that someone is a human being with a proper life just like you, being intolerant, biased or mean becomes way harder.

 

Of course this isn’t always to the taste of every one, countless times has Sophie Calle been called out for voyeurism, and some of her unsuspecting subjects have not appreciated being the topics of her observations. One of them even tried to sue her for contacting people in his address book (that she found int he street) and polish in a newspaper stories that they told her about him. When the trial was unsuccessful, the man found a nude photography of her and had it published in the same newspaper as retaliation. Her work definitely is controversial, but I fee like the initial approach of underlining the similarities of human beings that don’t realise they belong to a community  is nothing short of lifesaving. 

The other thing that is incredible in her pieces is how freely she gives herself, her life in the most intimate details, to us. She makes herself completely vulnerable, displays her weaknesses, her grieves, her heartaches, her sexual encounters, everything, letting us know that someone else feels the way we feel. And if she isn’t ashamed of it, but actually uses as her way of exorcizing her pain, so what should we be?