@rambo @missy <3
One of my favorite artists is a french lady called Sophie Calle, I learned a lot about her last year and the concepts she developed in art were really interesting to me, I loved her work so much because I can relate a lot to it.
She focuses a lot on human behaviour patterns and our private selves.
My favorite piece by her is a sculptural installation called "The Birthday Ceremony" that was made in 1998, but it was started from 1980 to 1993, when Sophie invented and sustained actual rituals around her own birthday, intertwining her work and her personal life.
During fourteen years and with little disruption, she kept holding an annual dinner party for her birthday and invited close friends and relatives, the number of invitees had to be exactly the number of her age, with an additional anonymous guest invited by a chosen invited one. This guest had to be unknown for Sophie and represented an unknown future, what's uncertain in life.
With these formalities, she ensured that her brithday was remembered each year in hopes to get rid of an obesessive insecurity she experienced in early adulthood. At the end of each year the gifts brought by guests were displayed unwrapped by her in glass-fronted cabinets as a constant reminder of affection from her loved ones. And she stuffed one cabinet per year, putting away every present she got. At stressful points of her life over the years she was able to unpack them and be reassured of her networks of support. in 1993 she was cured of her obsessive insecurity and no longer felt the need to recall her loved ones in such a formal way.
"The Birthday Ceremony" brings up all cabinets from those ceremonies, based on the design of the original cabinet, that was given to her by her father. The presents range from the banal to the bizarre, including works of art, hand made tokens of affection, books and letters, junk and antiques, plastic trivia, items stolen from a restaurant, bottles of wine, chocolates and so on. What fascinates me the most is that every cabinet encases a visual description of her age and you can see it transforming each year through the presents she gets, probably because when you make or buy a gift for someone you're trying to please them, to satisfy who they are at the time, somehow. It has a lot to do with your identity, what you're into and what your needs are. And Sophie Calle kind of made documentary records out of this.
To me it's really shocking how we construct our identity out of our own fears, around our own secret rituals without even noticing sometimes, which manifest in self indulgence or self denial (or both sometimes) behaviours. Isn't it weird how we surround ourselves with objects and acts in needs that they give meaning and substance to both our private and public lives?
