Shortly before the opening of my exhibition À toi de faire, ma mignonne at the Musée Picasso in Paris, a storm damaged my storeroom and mold spores got into The Blind, one of the series that was to feature in the show. To avoid any risk of contamination, the restorers determined it was preferable to destroy the works. Responding to the urgency of the situation, I staged their absence from the show. For a project that originated with the anniversary of Picasso’s death, and ended referencing my own eventual demise, the idea of decomposition seemed apt. But The Blind held too much importance in my own life for theirs to end in landfill. That is when I remembered artist Roland Topor’s idea of burying an old sweater that he could not bring himself to give away nor to discard.

The cryptoporticus at Arles is well suited to such a ceremony: the previous year, during the Rencontres, the persistent humidity in those subterranean galleries had insidiously attacked the photographs on display and fungus had won the day. Instead of protecting them, the venue had, paradoxically, precipitated their destruction. That this should have happened in a city that plays a major role in the preservation of images is not without irony. I decided that I would bury my Blind there, allowing them to continue disintegrating, so that their words, which speak of nothing but beauty, could seep into the city’s foundations.

I noticed that the rot had carefully chosen its victims. Besides the Blind, it had only affected those works that spoke of death or loss, as if their imperviousness were already compromised: bouquets of dried flowers; photographs of graves; the photograph of my mattress on which a man had set fire to himself; paintings of my mother’s last word. To these moribund works, which were being given a second death, I also added things from my life that I no longer had any use for but that I could bring myself neither give nor throw away.

Sophie Calle