Jean-Paul Demoule

Between 1978 and 1981, Sophie Calle went on a clandestine exploration of the then abandoned Hôtel du Palais d'Orsay. She selected room 501 as her home and without any preestablished method, set about photographing the abandoned hotel over five years. As she explored, she picked up items she found: customer reception cards, old telephones, diaries, messages addressed to a certain “Oddo” and more. Now, more than 40 years later, room 501 has disappeared and an elevator has taken its place. At the invitation of Donatien Grau, the Musée d’Orsay curator, Calle returned, equipped with a flashlight, to explore the site again during the lockdown period. She hunted down the ghosts of the Palais d'Orsay, now connected to the present by the visitors that had also deserted the museum. The work reconstructs the artist’s archive of photography, letters, invoices and other daily items which bring a forgotten past back to life. To provide commentary on her discoveries, Sophie Calle enlisted the award-winning French archaeologist Jean-Paul Demoule, who writes a series of texts combining fact and fiction. All of this evidence has been assembled to create an art object that resembles an investigation notebook.… (mehr)

This is a very interesting, pleasant-to-read and very synthetic introduction to prehistoric times, looked at from a specific angle, namely that of the images of humans or animals, as created by prehistoric man. Demoule uses this angle to guide you along the broad lines of human development, roughly between 40,000 years ago and the beginning of our era. There is also a geographic limitation: Europe and Southwest Asia are central. I agree, that makes the relevance of the book a bit smaller, but that is compensated by the smooth writing style and the author's comprehensible synthetic ability. The only real regret about this booklet is that only about twenty images have been included: a work that focuses on the figurative simply begs for more visual material. More substantive notes in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3896473037… (mehr)