I'm Edmund de Waal, I'm an artist, I use clay
and other materials and I also write books.
So, what I'm bringing to the
British Museum, is a library of exile.
When you come into room 2, what you'll
see is a large building covered in
-porcelain slip, a white apparition of a building,
with words written all the way around it,
a great history of the lost libraries of the world
written into the walls of this building and
you'll go in and it's a working library
it's a library full, stuffed full of books from
all the way around the world
and all these books which you are able
to reach down and read and discover
each of these books, each of the books in this library
are written by someone who's been forced into exile.
Someone who's been, because of who they were, because of their religion
because of their race, because of their political beliefs,
because of their gender, has been forced to leave the country that they
believed was their home and moved across a border.
So it's a history of exile but more than that it's a celebration of an
extraordinary world of people who've had
to move, migrate across borders.
And when you pick a book off the shelf you'll see
that it's as an Ex Libris label just
inside the book it says Ex Libris library of Exile
and you're encouraged
if there's a book that matters to you,
the book that really talks to you,
matters to you in terms of place,
language, history, you're encouraged to
write your name in it.
It becomes your book and some of the books in the library
have 50, 60, 70 names in it from all around the world.
So please write your name in this book.
So the reason it's here in the British Museum is twofold:
the first is that when you walk round
the outside of this library what you
have written into the walls is this
extraordinary, deep history of the
destroyed libraries of the world.
This appalling millennia after millennia history
of the destruction of Alexandria all the way through
to the dreadful 20th century,
the destruction of the university libraries of Europe,
the destruction of the room we're in now,
all the way through into the 21st century
and the terrible repeated burnings of libraries from Sarajevo
all the way through of course to Timbuktu and Mosul.
So there you have this cultural history of loss
or a history of cultural loss written into this library and of course
that's what the British Museum
profoundly talks to; is what's kept, what's preserved and what's lost.
This is a place which records what's been preserved,
what's been held out of the ruins and the destruction of repeated destructions of the world
through people endlessly trying to erase histories, stories and memories
and people and the British museum holds these stories
and records these losses so it's it's a good place to talk about loss.
Why now? it's always a good time to make a library.
Why now? because it's a deeply, deeply powerful moment
when we need to talk about people moving and the stories
they bring and to celebrate the fact that language is migratory,
it's diasporic, it moves across countries all the time
and we are profoundly enriched,
we've always been enriched by that.
So one of the things that matters to me
enormously about this whole project is
that is that the library doesn't stop here.
From the British Museum it goes to
Mosul where it's going to be part of the
new library there
the library that was destroyed by Isis three years ago.
So this library is on it's travels; it's going elsewhere
and extraordinarily that's what books and objects do
they are there in transit, they move from one place to another.
So when you've written your name in the book in this library
you know that next year this book will be in a library in Mosul.
You know it will have traveled and keeps on traveling and that matters.
It's absolutely who we are and how we connect with people in the world,
We take something, we're given something and we pass it back
and that's the the meaning of why this library is here.