This talk will present the story of the archive Beijing Silvermine and the process of building an archive. Thomas Sauvin will discuss the challenges and opportunities that emerged during the exploration of these images and how he approached the curation. He will highlight the process of identifying significant themes that emerged organically from the mass of images, and how he selected and arranged images to tell a coherent story. Sauvin will showcase some of the photobooks he has created over the last ten years and explain how they became crucial incarnations of his archive.

 Thomas Sauvin is a French collector, artist, and publisher based between Paris and Beijing. Since 2009, he has been salvaging discarded negatives from a recycling plant on the edge of Beijing, negatives that were destined for destruction. His Beijing Silvermine archive, one of the largest archival projects in China, now contains over a million anonymous photographs spanning the period from 1985 to 2005, allowing for the reconstruction of a large part of the history of popular analogue photography in the country.

Sauvin's unceasingly evolving archive provides a visual platform for cross-cultural interactions, while also impacting our collective memory of the recent past. His work has been widely exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, including at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Art, and the Guangdong Museum of Art.

Over the last ten years, he has published over ten photo books with various publishers, including the Archive of Modern Conflict (UK), Jiazazhi (CH), Skinnerboox (IT), The M Editions (FR), VOID (GREECE), RVB (France) as well as self-published artist books. His publications have entered the collections of institutions such as the TATE, the V&A, and the Pompidou Museum.