Take Care of Yourself Cover

Remediating Interpretation: Sophie Calle Rewrites Epistolarity
Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook

Anti-remediation, or visual-arts criticism without pictures: the case of Take Care of Yourself
A Short Guide to Severance

Figure 1. The advertising executive’s public service announcement campaign, “A Short Guide to Severance.” TCY (n.p.).

Figure 2. From the dvd entitled “The Mediation Session” showing Calle sitting beside the letter in the therapist’s office. TCY (n.p.).

 The Mediation Session
Calle's ethnomethodologist

Figure 3. Calle’s portrait of the ethnomethodologist. TCY (n.p.).

Figure 4. The seventh page of the ethnomethodologist’s report, showing the detail and variety of her attention to the “context of reception.” At the top of the page, six photos (“Images 12-17”) show Calle’s cellphone screen as she scrolls through the email, using her stylus. Red arrows indicate the direction of the stylus’s movement. The analysis intends to show how the content of the message may affect mastery of the techniques required for cellphone-based reading. The box in the middle of the page shows an excerpt from the annotated transcription of Calle’s vocalized reading of the email. TCY (n.p.).

 ethnomethodologist's report
TCY cover

Figure 5. The cover of the exhibition catalogue Take Care of Yourself (Actes Sud, 2007).

Cook, Elizabeth Heckendorn. "Remediating Interpretation: Sophie Calle Rewrites Epistolarity." In Women, gender, and print culture in eighteenth-c. Britain: essays in memory of Betty Rizzo, edited by Temma Berg and Sonia Kane. Rowman Littlefield Publishing Group, 2013. 285-301.
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