Sophie Calle: PLOTS

Sophie Calle: PLOTS, is a two-part exhibition exploring death, secrets, memory, and place through works in the museum’s galleries and a public art commission at Bolinas Cemetery.

PLOTS brings Calle back to Bolinas, a small beach town in coastal Marin known as an enclave for artists and poets, where she lived in the 1970s and took her first photographs. The museum exhibition “It would be nice to meet you beforehand…” derives its title from a letter Calle wrote to poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti when she purchased her cemetery plot in Bolinas in 2014. The photographic works on view in the museum’s galleries include meditations on life and death, presence and absence, secrecy and revelation through the artist’s signature ironic humor and personal stories.

Here Lie the Secrets of the Visitors of Bolinas Cemetery is an off-site public art commission in which Calle, using her gravesite at the Bolinas Cemetery as an installation and performance space, invites members of the public to share their innermost secrets with her, to be entombed in perpetuity.

While present on her plot for a one-day activation on Saturday, March 27, 2027, the artist will offer visitors a choice between committing their secrets to paper and then through a slot in the gravestone or, alternatively, confiding them directly to the artist, who will record them to memory while respecting full anonymity. The gravestone will act as a protected site for these secrets throughout the run of the exhibition and beyond.

Sophie Calle: PLOTS is curated by Natasha Boas and Jessica Shaefer with Sophia Sanzo-Davis.