An archive

Abstract

"Edmund de Waal has created a book about archives that is itself archival, a gathering together of his reflections on archives from over a decade in chronological order. The book is also cyclical, it starts in Odessa in 2009 and ends in Paris in 2021 encountering his family archives in both places. In-between there are his responses to the archives of poets and artists and places he loves. An Archive offers the opportunity to read texts by De Waal originally included in previous publications that are no longer available to the reader. The effort to put together all this material is not only an archival work but also an essay on the topic that offers different approaches to the definition and the experimentation of an archive by the viewer or its creator. Like much of De Waal's work, this book is concerned with collecting and collections--how objects are kept together, lost, stolen or dispersed. This book is part of the Ivorypress Archives series, which aims to make unpublished, long lost or sold out material available to the general public." -- Publisher's description.

Contents

Foreword -- Family archives. Odessa -- Vienna -- London -- Literary and artistic archives. Collections -- Titles -- Atmosphere -- Porcelain -- Last things -- Getting lost -- Attachments -- White -- Witness -- Breath -- Pencil -- Gold -- Fear -- Exile -- Ash -- Family archives. Paris -- Afterword -- Postscript : conversation -- List of illustrations.