Renowned French conceptual artist Sophie Calle has released a fascinating exploration of incompleteness with her latest work, "Catalogue raisonné de l'inachevé" (Catalogue of the Unfinished), published by Actes Sud. The book reveals what she describes as "the entire submerged part of decades of work," offering an unprecedented look into her abandoned projects and unfinished ideas. This unique publication coincides with her 2023 exhibition "A Toi De Faire, Ma Mignonne" (Your Turn, My Dear) at the Picasso Museum in Paris, where she literally lived during the entire duration of the show.
Calle, who won the prestigious Hasselblad Prize in 2010 and received the Praemium Imperiale prize in Tokyo in 2024—often considered the "Nobel Prize of the arts"—has built her career on blurring the boundaries between intimate and public spaces, reality and fiction, and art and life. Described variously as a conceptual artist, photographer, videographer, and even detective, she has made incompleteness a central theme of her artistic practice. In her new catalogue, each abandoned project is stamped with a red verdict indicating the reason for its incompletion, revealing "the main motifs of her work, such as chance, fortuitous encounters, and especially her master idea of incompleteness as fulfillment, with trial and failure as corollaries of artistic action."
The concept for both the book and the Picasso Museum exhibition emerged from a profound realization Calle had while preparing for the show. Rather than confronting Picasso's immense body of work directly, she found herself face-to-face with what she calls "his ghost." As she began moving her personal belongings to the museum, she discovered that "all that remained at home was what I had not finished: the projects I had started, the ideas in suspense." This revelation led her to understand that "the almost finished is life," a phrase she borrowed from Picasso himself, which became the guiding principle of her exhibition.
Calle's approach to these unfinished works was revolutionary in its acceptance of incompleteness. Rather than attempting to complete these abandoned projects, she chose to give them form in their unfinished state. "I wanted to complete them in their incompleteness," she explains. This process became "a way of organizing them, of setting them down, and of lightening myself." The exhibition served as both an artistic statement and a personal catharsis, allowing her to acknowledge and celebrate the incomplete aspects of her creative process.
During the exhibition at the Picasso Museum, Calle took the concept of living with incompleteness to its literal extreme by actually residing within the museum space. "My house was entirely at the Picasso Museum," she recalls. She set up her office in a small room inside the exhibition, separated by a door that visitors could knock on. The only rule she established was the simple idea that people could enter if they had "something to say." This unusual arrangement created an unpredictable dynamic between the artist and her audience.
The experience of living within her own exhibition produced a range of encounters that perfectly embodied her philosophy of incompleteness and chance. Some visitors came simply to see her, which she admits "annoyed" her because they "had nothing to contribute." However, she also received people who proposed projects to her—sometimes very small ones, sometimes eccentric ideas. The space became what she describes as "a fragile, uncertain conversation space, where each encounter could be a beginning, a fragment, or a failure." This living experiment demonstrated how incompleteness creates space for possibility and unexpected connections.
Calle's reflection on incompleteness extends far beyond the realm of art into a broader philosophy about the human condition. She insists that incompleteness is not an accident or failure, but rather an essential aspect of being human. "Completion is the end," she argues, and finishing something means losing what keeps us in motion. According to her worldview, we live in "the sketch, the attempt, the search." What remains unfinished continues to accompany us, to push us forward, and to keep us alive creatively and spiritually.
The artist's philosophy challenges conventional notions of success and completion that dominate both the art world and society at large. She concludes with the profound observation that "we never really finish anything," and it is precisely this inability to complete that allows us to continue creating. Her "Catalogue of the Unfinished" serves as both a mirror to her earlier work "Des histoires vraies" (True Stories) and a manifesto for embracing the incomplete, the uncertain, and the perpetually unfinished aspects of creative and human existence. Through this exploration, Calle transforms what might be seen as artistic failure into a celebration of the ongoing, ever-evolving nature of both art and life.
