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sleep can be difficult in the presence of others; and the state of sleep or unconsciousness can also render us
more vulnerable to physical attack or infringement, although we are not necessarily completely de-sensitised to
the external world when we are asleep. 6 Taken as a whole, these factors clearly indicate that issues of trust
were essential to the success of this project, 7 and particularly in the case of those who participated as
strangers. 8 Characteristic of Calle’s other works, what we find in The Sleepers are issues of accessibility and
inaccessibility, as well as visibility and invisibility. It is this set of features that begins to make The Sleepers
interesting from a sociological point of view.
The main point behind Calle’s project, as she explains, was to monitor and record her bedroom as ‘a constantly
occupied space for eight days’ (Calle, 1996, p. 21). However, as Guralnik notes, often in Calle’s works there is
also an ‘attempt to represent what is absent.’ 9 And this is a crucial observation because, for me, it captures the
essence of something else that Calle attempted to achieve with The Sleepers – namely an (a)social experiment.
Again, I return to Calle’s opening line from the project because it sums up Guralnik’s point so neatly and
efficiently: ‘I asked people to give me a few hours of their sleep’ (1996, p. 21, emphasis added). To be clear,
when we ask for another person’s time, we are making a request which, to a greater or lesser extent,
acknowledges time as perhaps the most precious of all commodities; and asking for another’s time usually also
hints at the shared nature of a particular social exchange, whether formal or informal, with mutual benefits. But
cleverly, Calle’s use of the word ‘sleep’ – as opposed to ‘time’ – indicates the largely one-sided nature of the
(a)social situation in her experiment. Essentially, it is therefore an absence of sociality that is represented in The
Sleepers, via the blankness of sleep and the one-way direction in which it is represented. Aside from her own
occasional shift in the bed, the passage of time really only exists as a conscious experience for Calle; her
subjects, oblivious to the world if they do sleep, do not experience the events consciously. Socially speaking,
theirs is a kind of dead time.
This is what Calle was seeking with this project: access to the non-social side of people’s lives, without
compromising the intimacy (the mutuality of physical presences) which is imperative if the motif of social
suspension is to be applicable (because, after all, cameras do not necessarily need a constant human presence
in order to function). The state of sleep is perhaps the only one that can permit this unique relationship of
absence and presence in the same moment. Indeed, social interaction with each participant was of course
necessary in the initiation of this game; but just like the minds and the bodies of Calle’s subjects, in Calle’s game
social structures and interactions go to sleep for a given period of time, allowing her exclusive access to her
subjects from a position that they themselves can never really experience. Interestingly, the unilateral nature of
Calle’s experience here is, to some extent, mirrored in the practice of photography itself. According to Sontag,
‘[t]o photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge
of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.’ 10
Calle regularly plays with the dynamics of visibility and the different subject positions involved in these. For
instance, voyeurism is often mentioned as a crucial theme in Calle’s projects. 11 However, Calle’s game in The
Sleepers implies a quite different relationship between the observer and the observed, namely one of
surveillance. To be part of this little game is an act of faith; it is to trust implicitly and to hand complete control
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