Amy Selwyn

What can objects remember that people cannot?

In Letters to Camondo, Edmund de Waal writes to Moïse de Camondo, the great collector who assembled an extraordinary collection of eighteenth-century French decorative arts in his Paris home.

The house became a museum. The collection survived. Much of the family did not.

Through a series of imagined letters, de Waal explores the relationship between objects and memory, between collecting and belonging, between what we choose to preserve and what history takes away.

I keep coming back to the idea that a collection is never simply a collection of things. It is also a portrait of the person who assembled it. An expression of desire, taste, identity, and perhaps even hope.

But objects cannot tell us everything.

And what is missing may be the most important part of the story.