The muse of displacement: Edmund de Waal’s ‘library of exile’

Nice project on Exile from Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, now showing a the British Museum in London. 

The predicament of the Exile is "as if a thread has been unspooled from the homeland to the land of exile, continually tugging the expatriated person out of time and place."

The muse of displacement: Edmund de Waal's 'library of exile'

A migratory installation explores how the loss of homeland has inspired and encumbered writers

yesterday

Edmund de Waal's installation 'library of exile' at the British Museum in London © Greg Funnell

"Books brought from Odessa and Vienna, sent from dealers in London and Zurich, his lifetime of reading, are taken off the library's shelves and sorted and packed into wooden crates." Thus Edmund de Waal's elegiac account of the "confiscation" of his Jewish great-grandfather Viktor's library. Its theft by the Nazis in 1938 foreshadowed a new era of displacement, including that of Viktor himself, who fled Vienna for England with his family.

De Waal describes himself as "an artist who writes", though when we meet at the British Museum a week before the opening of his new installation, library of exile, he tells me he finds it increasingly difficult to separate the two activities. Today he is equally well known for his books, especially the bestselling 2010 memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes, which includes the account of the fate of his great-grandfather's library, and his work in porcelain. Library of exile, which he has described as the most significant sculpture of his career, consolidates the themes of diaspora, memory and memorial he has returned to throughout his art and writing; but it also serves to reconcile those twin practices.

A roofless pavilion about the size of a shipping container, it is lined with shelves holding some 2,000 books by exiled writers. On the walls are also four of de Waal's vitrine works filled with porcelain pots. The library represents a kind of communal autobiography of the displaced person through history, from Cicero and Dante to the European émigrés of the 20th century and present-day author-exiles such as Elif Shafak and Aleksandar Hemon.

The installation is itself migratory, having arrived in London following sojourns in Venice and Dresden. From here it will travel to Mosul, Iraq, where it will remain. Readers are invited to write their own name inside volumes that are meaningful to them (each book has an ex libris plate for this purpose). The most-read volume is the children's book The Tiger Who Came to Tea, whose author, Judith Kerr, arrived in Britain from Germany in 1933. Visitors are also encouraged to suggest further books, which de Waal will add to the collection. "We're here for six months, so God knows how big the library will be at the end."

The scope of "exile" is certainly wide. The World Health Organisation estimates that 1bn people — almost one in eight of the global population — are living as migrants, of whom 68m have been forcibly displaced. From Syria and South Sudan to Russia and Colombia, exile is a defining condition of our time; but it is also as old as humankind itself. De Waal picks out a leather-bound edition of Ovid's Tristia, written in around AD8. In the opening pages of this archetypal exile text, the poet describes a stroll in the warmth of his beloved native Rome: "Now the public squares, now the temples, and now the marble theatres — ". Suddenly the tone darkens, the skies turn ashen; he acknowledges that what he has written is only a memory, for he is writing from Tomis on the Black Sea, 900 miles away from Rome, where he has been banished for an unnamed crime. The violence of that transition, from the comforts of the metropolis to windswept barbarian misery, is one committed by Ovid's own memory.

It's a predicament that the late Edward Said understood: "The exile exists in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting, nor fully disencumbered of the old." It's as if a thread has been unspooled from the homeland to the land of exile, continually tugging the expatriated person out of time and place.

See the whole article here: https://www.ft.com/content/cf1daa42-6219-11ea-abcc-910c5b38d9ed#myft:my-news:page 

In five decades, Nigel Andrews saw every movie and met all the stars

My 50 years as a film critic

In five decades, Nigel Andrews saw every movie and met all the stars. This is what he learnt

December 20 2019

© Greg Funnell | Nigel Andrews photographed at the Ritzy cinema in Brixton

It's as new as the last century, but simultaneously it's as old as time: film reviewing; moviemania as a way of life; picture-going as a paid passion.

Think of its ritualistic essence. We who call ourselves critics (or, in my case, will do so until New Year's night) sit there in the semi-dark being told stories. The "fire" flickering in front of us is a screen with moving images. Then, in true storytelling tradition, we go away and relate the stories to others.

I have been passing on film plots to readers — and parsing them — for 50 years now. That is an exact number. Like the year commemorated in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood, my talismanic twelve-month, my moment of nothing-will-ever-be-the-same-again, was 1969. A great deal happened in that year, both in movieland and elsewhere. Horror down below: the Manson murders. Transcendence up above: man went to the Moon. And I, mentally somewhere in between, went to a film called Marlowe, for reviewing which, in a now-departed magazine called Monthly Film Bulletin, I was paid my first professional shilling.

What a movie to start with! It featured a young, weird, shrilly gurgling kung-fu fighter in his first major international movie. He was Bruce Lee. He was fantastic. I believe — I certainly hope — that in what I wrote, I flagged Lee's stardom to come.

To my amazement, I was suddenly made richer by doing something I enjoyed. Seeing films for a living. A school friend, Robert Wynne-Simmons, with whom I had invented a board game that has since become quietly cultish ("The Gothic Game", relaunched this year as "Damnation"), had said to me in the months after we left university, "Why don't you try film reviewing?"

I didn't look back. In 1973, the Financial Times scooped me up from honourable toil at the British Film Institute, where I had spent 18 months as assistant-assistant-editor and contributing critic on the quarterly Sight & Sound, and assigned me the weekly movie whirl. I gave myself five years before the burnout I feared and expected. I even told my FT predecessor, David Robinson, whose move to The Times allowed me in, that I didn't expect to become a veteran.

Three decades later, when a colleague turned to me at the funeral of Alexander Walker, the illustrious and long-serving film critic of the London Evening Standard, and said, "43 years at the same newspaper! No one will ever equal that", I felt a veteran's surge of guilty competitiveness. 46 and a half years: that is the baton I now hand on to the next long-distance runner.

Read the rest of the piece online here: https://www.ft.com/content/ddca69c2-1822-11ea-8d73-6303645ac406

______________________________
MasterLiving
@MasterLiving

The Eternal Glamour of the #ArtDeco Beach House

A hundred years ago, architects all over the world upped anchor and sailed into an era of maritime fantasy. Seduced by the smooth lines, painted steel, portholes and ribbon windows of cruise ships, many built the finest houses of the 1920s and 1930s on beaches. 

They gazed out to sea as if longing for the nautical glamour of the transatlantic liner, just as shipping companies were vying to create the most lavish interiors, the sleekest profiles, the classiest balls and the fastest crossings. 

It was the era of seaside architecture, an evocation of sunshine and bracing fresh air — and it set the standard for coastal living. In the 2020s and around the world, there is a new appreciation of a style that still influences what is built on waterfronts. 

Art Deco by the Sea, a new exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, explores that brief flourishing in Britain. But the UK was just a corner. From Miami to Havana, Puerto Rico to Biarritz, Cape Town to Los Angeles, local versions of Art Deco sprang up in the most desirable seaside neighbourhoods.

See The whole article on the FT here: httpshttps://www.ft.com/content/f99a2ecc-525f-11ea-a1ef-da1721a0541e

bit.ly/MasterLiving