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language systems), thereby mimicking and mirroring the connected temporal chain of events between April 1 st
and April 9 th of 1979. This is a crucial effect of Calle’s lamination. The images are dependent on the text to
produce the order. How the two are arranged is an important part of the construction; it is not simply the
content of the text and photos that matters. What we find in The Sleepers, then, is an example of what I call
‘substantive lamination.’ In substantive lamination, what we have is a complex layering of information as
multiple photographs and texts combine to produce a narrative or a sequence. Indeed, it has been said of other
exhibitions by Calle that they ‘call for a linear reading.’ 24 Order and sequence are always part of the
presentation. The act of recording that is a crucial aspect for Calle. The little details and occurrences are
important in as much as, in photographic and textual form, they refer to events that took place between the
dates and times that are specified. According to Bois, ‘Calle’s work is not concerning remembrance but
contingency.’ 25 Yet there is an aspect of memory involved in this contingency, in this relationship between text
and photograph. In The Sleepers, the photographic evidence and the textual data are records; and the
associations between them have the effect of holding those eight days of history firmly in place, to testify that
Calle’s bedroom was indeed occupied during the whole of that time.
This is how Calle’s The Sleepers is laminated. The narrative builds as the textual intervention at the start of each
new visual sequence acts like the passing of a baton in a relay race, as the succeeding sleepers meet the
preceding ones; and we are given the precise dates and times for each shift and each change of shift. But the
content of the text is also important, as Calle uses it, often comically, in order to divulge little pieces of
information about the participants in the game, perhaps giving us clues as to their individual psychologies and
expectations; and we are able to infer connections between the photographs and the texts based on these
descriptions of events. For example, Calle explains that when she asked Frabrice Luchini, the fifteenth sleeper,
‘what he thinks he’s doing in my bed he answers: “Sex”’ (Calle, 2003, p. 149). Accordingly, there are numerous
images of Fabrice lying on his side and gazing into the camera, apparently suggestively. Fabrice’s immediate
successor, ‘Patrick X.,’ the sixteenth sleeper, tells Calle that ‘he came because he thought there would be an
orgy,’ though he also reveals that he ‘isn’t sorry about the way things turned out’ (Calle, 2003, p. 150). Such
issues as gender and sexuality therefore also become important and interesting themes in Calle’s project, even
if they were not part of her original agenda or design.
In addition to the intimacy of the situation, the centrality of the bed as a theme in this project perhaps makes it
almost inevitable that sex is invoked as a corollary. Discussing his first encounter with Calle’s work by way of
an exhibition of The Sleepers ‘at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris,’ Mordechai Omer notes that his
immediate ‘associations led’ him ‘to artists like Picasso and Magritte, who also dealt with sleeping people, with
sleep itself and with the way people who are awake react to it.’ 26 The link made with Magritte emphasises his
juxtaposition of (divergent) images and words in the series of paintings he called La Clef des Songes (The Key of
Dreams) 27 Omer notes that, often in the examples of Picasso’s art, the gaze is male, and it is directed towards a
female who is sleeping. Again, issues of (heterosexual) male power and visibility are invoked here. The female
body, incapacitated and exposed, is at the mercy of the male gaze. Magritte, of course, belonged to the Surrealist
movement; and in Surrealist art, sex and eroticism were almost always present themes, albeit usually in more
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