🌱 Seed 🌱 Public and Private Selves
This seed invites you to become a documentarian, a kind of private investigator of something in your own surroundings. Stick with this one thing and document it relentlessly, repeatedly, recording subtle changes and shifts in meaning. ( see Creative Strategies : extension)
Medium: photographs, text records, video.
Assemble and curate all documentation into a presentation or installation. Use captions and texts to explain.
Documentary starategies
- Choose everyday situations as your subject of investigation
- Develop a clear, forensic eye for human details
- Balance revelation with strategic concealment
- Document through multiple mediums (photography, text, video)
Observational Approach:
- Position yourself within an ordinary environment
- Record subtle details normally overlooked
- Look for banal moments that reveal deeper meanings
- Document systematically without judgment
Possible scenarios of investigation
- habits around consumption ( yours or others)
- a daily route
- a survey
- a particular space
- social media identities
Although this brief may have an element of voyeurism, I'm not suggesting you go as far as to invade others privacy or cross inappropriate boundaries. Better to stick with observation of something that either you have permission to cross examine in detail or that remains anonymous. You can be a voyeur of your own life, as Sophie Calle shows us.
Time frame
Collecting documentation is usually best done over a period of time, allowing for things to change and recording that process, but some decisions can be made quickly too. I suggest at least a period of several weeks to develop some substantial content.
For “The Hotel,” I spent one year to find the hotel, I spent three months going through the text and writing it, I spent three months going through the photographs, and I spent one day deciding it would be this size and this frame . . . it’s the last thought in the process.
—Sophie Calle
Artist link: Sophie Calle
Sophie Calle is a celebrated French conceptual artist who meticulously examines human relationships through forensic documentation: photos, text-based works, videos, and installations. Her approach is exemplified in her 1981 series "The Hotel," where she worked as a maid in a Venetian hotel in order to photograph and analyze guests' belongings, a transgressive and unabashedly voyeuristic project.
watch a short video clip on The Hotel
excerpt from The Hotel ( documented with above images)
Wednesday, February 18, 10 am. The room is empty. They have checked out. On a piece of paper in the wastebasket is the following text, scribbled in pencil: “Ghetto, Court of Malta and gilded mouth. Wooden staircase, street of love, the bridge of wonders. Turk sewer rats. House bricked-up windows. Secret courtyard of mysteries. Candelabras. Huntress. Arrow. Bow. Cows. Naked young girl. Names of fallen angels: Samael, Satael, Amabel. Narrow passage of nostalgia.”
They have forgotten a pair of panties and socks that are drying on the bathroom radiator. The towels are all over the place, and the water is still running in the washbasin.
Private or Public?
She has documented her personal life with relentless honesty too. In 2007, for her best-known work, “Take care of yourself” Calle asked 107 women to respond to a breakup email from her ex-boyfriend; they did, through song, dance, the written word, even crossword puzzles, which she assembled and presented as an exhibition. This is true fearless, poker-faced Sophie Calle style. I wonder if the boyfriend wishes he'd edited the email :)
Today's social media culture
The elements she pioneered - unfiltered autobiography, self-fashioning, and probing the boundaries between public and private - are now familiar features of our networked existence. Calle's artistic explorations of identity, revealing and concealing and self-presentation anticipated a world where everyone now engages in similar practices through their online personas and curated social media narratives.
https://www.guggenheim.org/teaching-materials/moving-pictures/sophie-calle
Find out more about the top image, Calle's 1998 The Chromatic Diet
Inquiry Questions
What information does my investigation reveal that was formerly hidden?
How do objects infer meaning on their own?
Which documentary medium is most suited to my investigation?
How would I present this to an audience?