memory data

“Double Game is a project in which she lived out a fictional role written by her collaborator Paul Auster, Calle based herself in a phone booth in New York, engaging with pedestrian life in the locality by smiling to the passers-by and exchanging cigarettes with them - all the while listing obsessively the number of smiles and cigarettes given and returned and the time each conversation lasted.”

“For months I followed strangers on the street. For the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested me. I photographed them without their knowledge, took note of their movements, then finally lost sight of them and forget them. At the end of January 1980, 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…”

“To follow the other is to take charge of his itinerary, it is watching over his life without him knowing it, it is to relieve him of his existential burden, the responsibility for his own life. Simultaneously, she who follows is relieved of responsibility for her own life as she follows blindly in the footsteps of the other. A wonderful reciprocity exists in the cancelation of each existence, in the cancelation of each subject’s tenuous position as subject. Following the other, one replaces him, exchanges lives, passions, wills, transforms oneself on the other’s stead.”