Although the popularity of Airbnb has skyrocketed in recent years, many people still enjoy staying in hotels. One of the reasons is having someone to clean up after you. But what if that person had another reason for being there?
For three weeks in 1981, Sophie Calle worked as a chambermaid in a Venetian hotel. While cleaning 12 rooms on the fourth floor, the French artist also “examined the personal belongings of the hotel guests and observed, through details, lives which remained unknown to me.”
Calle documents her discoveries in The Hotel. Recently released in English in celebration of its thirtieth anniversary, Siglio’s gorgeous hardcover edition has pages edged in gold and a cover striped by the rooms’ over-the-top floral wallpaper. Like much of Calle’s work, it’s a combination of images and text that gravitate toward and take a deadpan delight in the absurd. As in all of Calle’s work, she’s made a game for herself and takes its rules very seriously.
Calle divides the book by rooms. Each section is introduced by a color portrait of its bed. The surroundings are almost tackily ornate. Oriental carpets underfoot. Embroidered coverlets on the beds. Gold sconces on the walls. The furniture is wood and presumably old. Phone cords snake around the spindly legs of bedside tables.
Calle makes brief, factual observations (into a tape recorder she keeps hidden in her bucket). In the beginning, every discovery feels like a treasure. “An elegant nightgown that I had not seen before is thrown across the two unmade beds like a bridge,” she writes. The sight of a crumpled up pair of pajamas on the bed “does something to me.” Armoires hold wool suits and silk blouses. Spirals of orange peel molder in a trash can. Stubbed-out cigarettes stink up an ashtray. In one room, Calle immediately opens the window to air out the musty smell.
Shoes seem to be an important clue. Sometimes in her notes, Calle records their sizes. (A German guest has an “enormous” pair.) Once, finding a discarded pair of heels in the trash and discovering they’re her size, Calle takes them for herself.
She rummages through closets and rifles through drawers. If a suitcase is unlocked, it’s open game. Calle samples an untouched stash of chocolates, tries on makeup, and spritzes herself with perfume. She polishes off a half-eaten croissant. She reads different versions of the same message across various postcards, flips through an address book, and loses herself in a travel diary. Hearing a key in the door, she flings the book back in the suitcase where she found it and rushes out, eyes averted.
Calle seems to avoid contact with the guests—it might be one of the unspoken rules of her game—yet they sometimes collide. “I will try to forget him,” she writes of one man. One presses a tip into her hand. With single men especially, Calle’s fantasies about their lives take flight. She imagines running away with one—maybe home to Paris. Calle is clearly less interested in couples (although she eavesdrops on their conversations. One woman complains, “Modern art! Oh no, not modern art!”). Calle couldn’t care less about children. Seeing a photo of little pairs of shoes, you know it’s over for her. “I am already bored with these guests,” she confesses.
The photos of the things Calle finds—dentures, a vibrator, a little hammer, pornographic magazines—are shot in black and white. These are not beautifully composed shots. Calle works with a deliberate aesthetic detachedness. She uses her camera to record detail in a factual way—like evidence from a crime scene.
From the guests’ possessions, she surmises things about them. Each morning is a fresh opportunity to test out a hypothesis about their habits. She observes which beds have been slept in, which haven’t. It’s a relief to find some of the order she restored the day before still intact: “For once, the pillows have remained as I arranged them.” Yet she’s more interested in absence than presence: stray hairs, a single sock, a forgotten lipstick. Calle photographs empty hangers facing in different directions and an indentation in the mattress where a guest slept the night before.
Having little to do in a room gives Calle more time to snoop, yet the rooms are often a mess. Wet towels on the floor, the water left running, panties hanging over the shower rod. One couple takes down a mirror and stashes it in the cupboard. Calle stubbornly puts it back in place and is relieved to find it still hanging there the next morning.
Maintaining order might be another rule of her game. It’s certainly part of her job as a maid. She doesn’t complain, but you can see how challenging a job it is. The contents of suitcases seem to explode across a room. Venetian masks dangle from the sconces. How do you make up a bed when pajamas are left tangled up in the sheets? How do you clean the tub when a pair of period-stained panties is left lying in it? (In one room, discovering a dirty pair of underwear in a sink basin, Calle covers it with a towel.) Yet she’s startled when the mess has been packed up and carried away: “gone is the jumble I was already getting used to.”
Over the course of her employment, the monotony of her labor begins to weigh on her: “a strange feeling of déjà vu comes over me.” Sometimes the visits seem to overlap. Cleaning a room for a certain guest for the last time, she notices that the “future occupants’ baggage has already been brought into the room.” She thinks “of the man who stayed in this room yesterday with the same sense of privacy”—after all, from the moment we check in, we think of a hotel room as our room. How would we feel if someone else was in it? Going through our things?
The Hotel raises ethical concerns. Yet it still feels like a small, precious time capsule. Today, we carry so many of the intimate details of our lives on our phones. What would there be to discover in a 21st Century hotel room? Sneakers and leggings?
Seen another way, The Hotel is less about voyeurism and more about a lonely young woman in a foreign country making a game of work that’s a kind of drudgery. “A strange atmosphere of silence hangs over the hotel,” she observes. Every day is spent alone, cleaning up after a stranger. For all their particularities as individuals, guests become indistinguishable in the collective. Not people, but a category: mess-makers. Facing another overflowing suitcase, Calle confesses, “I’ve had enough.” The Hotel well documents Calle’s interest in observing and knowing: not the guests whose possessions it records, but the limits of her patience and the boundlessness of her imagination.
