Sophie Calle. 'The Chromatic Diet' & 'Birthday celebration'

'Calle's work is very much tied up with a process. Her art unfolds as she goes through each stage of preparation and execution. As she descibes (below), the form of the final product - the thing which the gallery viewer actually sees - is the least significant part.'

Over a fourteen-year period, aside from the occasional year of disruption, Sophie calle held an annual dinner party on the evening of her birthday. To each celebration she invited a group of friends and relatives, the precise number of invitees corresponding to the number of years of her age, with one additional, anonymous guest nominated by a chosen guest, in order to symbolise the unknown of her future. She initiated these dinner parties to ensure that her birthday was remembered each year.

They were the most ambitious of a series of rituals Calle had invented to override an obsessive insecurity she experienced in early adulthood. The guests brought gifts, tokens of love and affection, and she displayed in a glass-fronted cabinet, as a constant reminder of this affection. At the end of the year the objects were boxed up and put away, their places taken by the gifts of another birthday dinner party. At stressful moments over the years Calle was able to unpack the boxes and reassure herself of her networks of support. When she became forty in 1993, Calle realised she had been cured of this obsessive insecurity and no longer felt the necessity to recall her friendships and family ties in such a formal way.