Edmund de Waal – an Archive

This is a book about archives that is itself archival, a gathering together of Edmund de Waal’s reflections on archives from over a decade, presented in chronological order. Yet the book is also cyclical. It begins in Odessa in 2009 and ends in Paris in 2021, encountering De Waal’s family archives in both places. In between are his responses to the archives of poets and artists and places he loves. In addition, it includes texts he has written for previous publications which are no longer available, indicating his own archival efforts. De Waal explores different approaches to the definition of archival work as well as the experimentation of an archive by both the viewer and its creator.