How to Become an Archive | Kirstine Autzen | Breadfield Press
550 krHow to Become an Archive is an artist book about the things we surround ourselves with: how they shape us, and how their loss can open a transformative space for new meaning and self-understanding. It is a book about beginning again, from fragments, memory, and from what can be imagined into being.
How to Become an Archive began in a local historical archive, where artist Kirstine Autzen found and documented a myriad of objects once charged with intimate, personal meaning: a christening gown, lace gloves, a family album. In the archive, these objects had become detached from their owners and absorbed into a shared field of collective memory. While working with this material, Autzen’s own studio burned down, erasing years of accumulated material.
In this book, Autzen examines how our identity is shaped through the preservation, organisation, and eventual loss of things and the role of photography and memory in processing this. The result is a tactile, hybrid book that moves between documentation and imagination — a space where absence itself becomes generative. In contrast to the static nature of archival logics, How to Become an Archive is process-oriented and open-ended: Autzen breaks apart the material, rearranges fragments, and allows meaning to accumulate through rhythm, colour, texture, and juxtaposition.
The book combines photographs, drawings, and short poetic texts that trace how meaning clings to things — and how the act of looking becomes a form of reconstruction.
Title:
How to Become an Archive
Author:
Kirstine Autzen
Year:
2025
ISBN:
978-91-988210-7-9
Publisher:
Breadfield Press
Design:
Lisa Olausson & Kirstine Autzen
Language:
English / Danish
Translator:
Jennifer Russell
Edition:
300 copies / 30 special edition
Pages:
238
Dimensions:
20 x 28 cm
Binding:
Raw-cut binding with exposed black bookbinder’s board
Printed by:
Narayana Press
