An hour with… Sophie Calle

Photograph by Joshua Woods

One day in 1999, the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle started thinking about the French expression, L’argent n’a pas d’odeur – Money has no smell – which interested her in part because “I have less smell than anybody I know,” she said recently.

A friend put her in touch with a young perfumer called Francis Kurkdjian to see if he’d be interested in trying to bottle the scent of money and the pair embarked on a project. It was a typically Calle-ish idea: an exploration of the invisible ordinary, imbued with fantasy.

Today, Kurkdjian is the perfume creation director at Christian Dior and one of the most important perfumers in the world. Baccarat Rouge 540, a scent from his own perfume house, was once described by the New York Times as “the internet’s favourite fragrance”. In 2025, his status was such that he launched a version that cost $28,000 per bottle, and a recent exhibition in Paris celebrated 30 years of his work.

But when he received Calle’s request he was only 30 himself and just starting out. Not long before, studying at perfumery school, he had been taught to understand scent by being blindfolded, then given a taste of strawberry yoghurt sprinkled with salt. Of Armenian descent and now living in Paris, he’d been staying in New York, “where it was common to have two or three hundred dollars on you: you pay for the cab, you pay for the hot dog in the street, you pay for your subway tickets, you sniff cocaine, you stick a note in a stripper’s waistband…”

“I was a stripper!” said Calle, brightly. The smell of money, continued Kurkdjian, is fat, ink, cocaine, a certain filth.

The three of us were talking over Zoom; I could see Kurkdjian reclining in his Paris office. The project with Calle, he said, “was very important for me as a perfumer. At the time, perfumery was very much about pretty smells. And Sophie opened a creative playground for me. Perfume became something totally by itself. Not a brand. Not to smell good, not to please, not to be nice.”

He created a fragrance for her and called it the Scent of Money, and while few people experienced it, it transformed the way he’d go on to work. Calle herself was less interested in the fragrance than the idea of the fragrance. In one of her most famous pieces, she asked blind people to describe their image of beauty: “They could answer ‘my mother’, ‘a cat’ or ‘this mountain’. I didn’t care, because it was not what they said that mattered, but the fact they could describe something missing. That was just the motor. It was the same with Francis,” she said.

Calle is currently taken up with the idea of “making space”. She wants “to clean my head, clean my drawers, get rid of all the things I don’t want to leave behind. It’s an obsession of somebody that’s 72 years old.”

She went some way towards this “getting rid” by putting on a show in 2023 at Musée Picasso, for which she emptied much of her house into its second floor gallery. When I walked through the gallery in 2024, it felt as though she was haunting the place. Her accompanying text read: “My mother is dead, my father is dead, I have no children. When I’m gone, what will become of my things?” They would be sold at auction. In order to “exorcise the fear that when I die” their shared history will be erased, she wrote, “I must begin with the dress rehearsal of what will happen to my estate.”

So Calle asked auctioneers “to stage my nightmare”, drawing up an inventory and valuation of her assets, including taxidermied animals and crockery. She excluded her own art, since it had already been catalogued, “as well as the jewellery I wish to wear when dead”. Getting rid of something, she said, or making art out of a loss, “is a way to turn things around.” To rewrite grief. “I’m going to show my work and then I’m going to show my house and then I’m going to show my failure. And like that it’s done.”

In 2023, a storm hit Calle’s storeroom, flooding her studio and ruining much of her archive, including her project about blind people’s ideas of beauty. When she returned to the room, she started to pick gingerly through the photographs, throwing everything mouldy away, until the mushrooms on one piece struck her as “quite decorative”. Seeing the photographs in the trash, “slowly dying”, an idea for a new piece began to emerge.

“Sometimes it takes 16 years to click, like the project about money, and sometimes it takes half an hour. When I did the project asking 107 women to analyse my breakup letter, I got the idea two days after the departure of the man.” This was 2007’s Take Care of Yourself, named after her then-boyfriend’s parting words – the breakup letter was set to music, reordered by a crossword-setter and interrogated by a forensic psychiatrist. Kurkdjian nodded. “Creation is not about being precise,” he said. “Creation is more about finding your way on a foggy day.”

Calle is working on something new now, but refused to talk about it, “because if I don’t finish it for 10 years, it becomes even heavier by the impossibility to give it a life.”

She decided to exhibit the damaged photographs underground in the ancient cryptoporticus at Arles, maintained in their damp state as water from the ceiling steadily dripped down the walls. “I wanted to give them a more poetic, more ritual end than just putting them in a truck for garbage.” At the entrance she scribbled a blank warning: “For those of you thinking of ‘borrowing’ one of the works in this exhibition, if I let them decompose it’s because they are extremely toxic and will contaminate your home. SC.” The photographs will be “treated like old Egyptian mummies,” she said. “So it’s like… refusing the death?”

She sighed. “I’ve been surrounded with water this year. I went to New York last week, staying in an apartment of a friend. I started the bath and I went to sleep, and when I woke up, the whole building was flooded. It’s my year of the flood!” She paused, inhaling. “I hope it’s going to stop now.”