While strolling around Geneva, thinking about what to write for my next blog, I came across the building of Sotheby’s. This Auction House, like others of its kind, has always felt to me like an atmospheric crossroads, a place where objects move through with traces of the people who lived with them, admired them or simply kept them close. On a whim, I went inside. Just to the right of the entrance, I noticed a catalogue for an upcoming auction of Chinese porcelain. It immediately reminded me of the pieces that inspired Babs and were displayed alongside her work during the Porcelain Mountains exhibition in 2023 at The Hague.
The catalogue was not something I expected to find. As I soon learned, the book was not for sale; it belonged to the institution’s private reference collection, one of those quietly essential resources that support expertise behind the scenes. When I mentioned the ArchivorumArk project I contribute to, the staff were unexpectedly welcoming. They allowed me to explore not only this catalogue but also others from previous years, including volumes produced by their teams in Paris, New York and Hong Kong. They guided me into a small room, placed the book gently on a table and told me I was free to read it and photograph selected pages, though I could not take it with me. They kept a single copy, preserved for internal study.
As I sat turning its pages, I felt something that archivists and researchers know well. The book held stories of porcelain that had travelled through European hands centuries ago: Chinese export bowls, Sèvres vases once admired in aristocratic interiors, Meissen figures whose owners’ names have long faded from memory. Yet their journeys could still be reconstructed through these catalogues: the dates when they resurfaced, the collections they belonged to, the shifting attributions that accompanied them over time. It became clear how the dispersed archives of Sotheby’s, existing across locations and decades, form a subtle but invaluable cultural network.
Archives within auction institutions hold a distinctive place in the wider landscape of cultural memory. They sit at the meeting point of scholarship, connoisseurship and storytelling. They record not only the objects themselves but also the social histories that surround them: the changing tastes, the individuals who shaped them and the pathways through which ideas travelled. In many ways, these archives act as informal biographies of material culture, tracing how objects move, transform meaning and gather new layers of significance.
Unlike museum archives, which are often highly structured, these materials feel immediate. They capture moments when an object shifts from one context into another, moments that might otherwise disappear from the historical record. They also safeguard information that may not exist anywhere else: reconstructed provenance, expert annotations or photographs taken before a work returns to private life. When only a single copy of a catalogue survives, that book becomes a cultural witness, essential for anyone trying to trace the broader history of artworks and decorative objects.
In that quiet room, I realised how vital such archives are for research projects like ArchivorumArk. They help us map connections across continents, follow artistic influences and understand how ideas and aesthetics circulate over time. They remind us that the history of an object is rarely straightforward. It is layered, shaped by its makers, its caretakers and the people who study it.
Auction houses are often associated with moments of display, yet their archives reveal another role, shaped by the market frameworks in which they operate. They chart shifting currents of taste, the development of connoisseurship and cultural exchanges.
When I left that day, I felt the quiet satisfaction of having encountered a rare archive, material not easily accessible and shared only with those who look closely enough to discover something deeper.