At Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, NYC: Sophie Calle's Obelisk for Visitors' Secrets

Green-Wood Cemetery, a National Historic Landmark in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is home to a long-term public work by the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle. Titled Here Lie the Secrets of the Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery, it was commissioned by the New York nonprofit Creative Time and is co-presented with the cemetery. It is scheduled to run for 25 years.

The centerpiece is a marble obelisk of Calle's design, shaped something like a tombstone, with a slot in its side. Visitors write a secret on paper and push it through the slot, and it drops into the ground below. At the two-day inauguration on April 29 and 30, 2017, Calle was on site to receive some visitors' secrets in person. That event was free and open to the public. It also offered free maps of the cemetery designed to accompany the piece, plus guided walking tours of the cemetery's symbols and iconography.

Today, the installation can be seen during regular cemetery hours, and visitors can deposit secrets on their own. Calle has pledged to return periodically over the 25 years, each time the grave is filled. She will exhume the papers and cremate them in a ceremonial bonfire service with a moment of remembrance. Creative Time's director, Katie Hollander, has described the planned ceremony as being "like a bonfire party."

The work is the first US version of a similar 20-year piece installed in a Geneva cemetery in 2016. Hollander has noted that most Creative Time projects last four to six weeks, whereas 25 years is a short-term initiative for a cemetery. Green-Wood maintains the work for its duration. At the opening, Calle's invitation named a tombstone dedicated to the secrets on Bay Grove Hill in the cemetery.

Calle has built a career on death, obsession, and things left behind, so a burial ground suits her. For Japanese readers, it offers an art encounter outdoors among the cemetery's mausoleums and monuments, rather than inside a museum.