What is a Fragment? directed by Vazira Zamindar

Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar is a historian and an artist based at Brown University, and this film emerges from years of working in the colonial archive on the entanglements of art, imperialism and war. The large-scale colonial plunder of Greco-Buddhist or Gandhara sculptures began in the nineteenth century amidst massive British military mobilizations, punitive expeditions and aerial bombing of the Indo-Afghan borderlands. At the same time, a vibrant Buddhist art history formed around these displaced objects in European and American museums. But what was the effect of this large-scale plunder and displacement on the wounded worlds they left behind?

The film was made on a shoestring budget, and much of the film was shot by Vazira on her iPhone Pro 13, and by artists Alejandro Borsani and Eli Neuman-Hammond. Eli is a sound artist, and so when he edited the footage he paid particular attention to ambient sound, and produced a really beautiful soundscape. Joy Chen, a film student at Brown, did the subtitles as a literary rather than technical exercise.

Although the film is about the displacement of objects into museums under colonialism, it is an elegy, an essay on postcolonial grief, for there is no other way to give an account of the destruction of knowledge worlds that had once sutured Muslim and non-Muslim cohabitations over centuries. The film argues that only after we recognize and grieve the material and epistemic rupture that we can begin the shared tasks of restitution and repair.