Breaking up is never easy. That final face-to-face confrontation when you bring out the old "it's not you, it's me" line and you hope the other person doesn't burst into tears in the middle of the restaurant; it's a situation no one ever wants to go through. So thanks to technology, people can avoid that unnecessary awkwardness and discomfort of their (ex-)significant others breaking down in front of them as their feelings are torn to shreds by sending an email or a short text message : "things not going gr8. reckon we shud c otha ppl. soz x p.s. its not u its me". You can imagine that their reaction would be 10 times as bad if they were to receive a message like this, but at least you don't have to be around to see it.

In reality, all that this new technology has done is make us more cowardly; taking the easy way out and just writing them a quick note and then erasing them for one's life. Even a phone call takes more courage since the other person has a chance to respond, even if he or she is not there with you. Perhaps more to the point is how one is supposed to react to something like this. You'd know that if this is how they've chosen to end the relationship, the chances of you getting in contact with them in the near future are slim to none. So what is one supposed to do? What exactly are you supposed to do with that text message or that email?

It's this question that became the foundation for French multimedia artist Sophie Calle's latest exhibition, 'Take Care of Yourself'. In 2006, she received an email from her last boyfriend in which he ended their relationship. A lot of points were made, about what they had agreed upon at the beginning of the relationship, things that had changed and things that hadn't changed, and so on. But basically, it boiled down to "it's not you, it's me". Not knowing what to do with the email (and always one to put her own personal life at the very heart of her art), she decided to send it to 107 women and asked each one to respond to it according to her profession. The result is a smorgasbord of analyses and interpretations, some of them so different from each other that one wonders whether they were even reading same letter. Among the 107 women, there were a few famous names (or at least that I recognised): musicians Feist, Peaches, and Miss Kittin; and actresses Miranda Richardson and Jeanne Moreau. There were also diplomats, criminologists, judges, lawyers, psychiatrists, and so on. Many of these gave very analytic profiles of the ex-boyfriend, picking up on specific phrases, form and style, tone, etc. These profiles would be displayed on the wall in huge prints, as seen in the photo above. For the artists she had asked to respond to the letter (this included everything from opera singers to performance artists as well a variety of actresses and musicians), there were a total of 33 TV screens showing their videos on loop with a bigger TV alternating between them all and allowing the public to listen to them too. Most of the actresses did a reading of the letter in their own way whilst the musicians choose parts of the letter and turned them into lyrics; Feist's interpretation was a particularly interesting one as she choose a single phrase from the letter and sang it over and over again, using a guitar pedal to add overlays and overdubs, creating an entire choir singing this single phrase. The ongoing, infinite chanting put across that anger that would be endlessly building upon reading the letter.

However, the more imaginative and more fascinating responses that I found came from the more unusual professions. A professional marksman responded by sending Calle the boyfriend's printed email back with 3 bullet-holes, each one over the word 'amour'. A cartoonist sent a short strip which in one panel had a man looking pleased with himself after finishing an email, surrounded by quotations books, philosophy books and thesauruses, and in the other panel, a woman looking miserable, reading an email in a dark room. A children's author sent back a short story that was a fable about a young man who, with the aid of the Devil, tricks a beautiful queen into falling in love with him. An 18th century historian compared him to a libertine, one who wished to break free from amorous passions but who could not control his lust. My favourite one was from a chess player who compared their relationship to a chess match: a picture of the board at the end of the match showed a white king (Calle) surrounded by 2 black, ineffective rooks while the black king lay fallen on the board witout a single white piece nearby. She commented on how it's an unwritten rule that chess match should never be abandoned. Since this one was, she didn't what to make of it.

As I looked at all these different responses, I began to wonder about the reason for the exhibition. Comparing a criminologist's psychological profile to a headhunter's description of the boyfriend may bring up some questions of self-perception and how we are viewed by others, but that didn't appear to be the motivation behind it all. Then it dawned on me that perhaps there wasn't actually any real meaning to it. Or rather, it was simply to show what all these women had thought; from an emotional point of view, all of it was unnecessary. Calle had been looking for an answer and in asking these women for their opinions, she had been looking in the wrong place. What she needed to do was ask herself and deal with it herself. One writer made the point that she was mistaken in thinking that she could deal with this emotional pain with "a squadron of women". This would only surround her with more contempt and anger. As she puts it at the end of her response "the choir you've formed around this letter is the choir of death". It's a reminder that at the end of the day, you're the only person who's going this painful experience and you're the only one who's going to be able to truly deal with it.

Of course my opinion is just another response to the letter, and were it to be followed, there wouldn't be any exhibition to talk about in the first place. Considering all the responses, if we examine and compare them, there's probably none that's more sensible, mature, and reassuring than that of Calle's mother. As she answers her daughter's letter, she says (in the way that only mums know now, I'm only paraphrasing of course), "These things happen, you just have to deal with them and try to move on. You'll meet many more people in your life, don't worry about that. And after all, maybe you can use this in a new art project of yours."

To see what your own response to the boyfriend's letter would be, here it is.

Dear Sophie...