Description

“Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried.”
-- Walter Benjamin



We always evoke memories by looking at something has been lost—it is the nature how memory is born. My research involved in what is around and inside the written language and memory had intrigued my curiosity to trace and excavate people’s forgotten memories as if an archaeologist dig human’s buried past.

A book is a miniature of memory, it is not only a fragment of the world but itself a little world. My interest in memory and archive had driven me to draw attention onto “the authentic habitants of libraries.” Through investigating the books reported missing at Chelsea College Library during the past five years, my project aims at evoking people’s memories and exploring these lost-and-found by seeing books as memories of artifacts to collect, to classify, to catalog, and transform them in a space constructed upon the archive of the lost memories. I believe the small details of a thing can be an evocative sign that appeals to every sense of memory and creates an entire environment in the world of imagination “Like the librarians of Babel in Borges’s story, who are looking for the book that will provide them with the key to all the others.”