Fragment No. 97

A Day at the Museum as Seen by a Carpet

What do a seventeenth-century dragon carpet and ship recycling have in common? At first glance, the overlaps don't exactly jump out: a carpet is woven, made of fabric, and mostly decorative, while a ship is made of steel, is a functional object, and is many times larger than a carpet. Yet as I wander with carpet fragment #97 through the exhibition Ship Worlds – The Ocean and Us in the Bangert Building of the German Maritime Museum (DSM)/Leibniz Institute for Maritime History, and pause in front of the steel fragment of the BREMEN 4, I suddenly see many connections between the two fragments. They are both parts of a larger story. Lost in thought, I imagine what it would be like if the two fragments were to talk to one another:

Carpet fragment #97 had been shut away in a dark bag for weeks; now it is suddenly very bright, almost glaring. The room with its high white walls is decorated with floor-length, printed banner posters. They show people at work: men in T-shirts, loose trousers or shorts and flip-flops standing on beaches in front of enormous container ships. In the background, men climb around on these steel giants. Next to the ship they look tiny, like ants. Other posters display numbers and data: in 2022, 292 ships and offshore platforms were scrapped on the beaches of Alang in India, Gadani in Pakistan, and Chittagong in Bangladesh.

The carpet knows India very well too, since that is where the replica was made. While 127 ships met their end on India's beaches, Dhanni Devi and her daughters Meenakshi, Suman, and Kiran Bunklar spent four months in 2022 near Jaipur (Rajasthan) working on the reproduction of the dragon carpet. Jaipur is 873 km from Alang. Working by hand as well, equipped with metal combs, knives, and a loom rather than welding equipment, they created a piece of fabric that, now divided into smaller fragments, travels the world collecting stories.

The carpet fragment does not lie on a flat surface, but on a rough material with sharp edges and many unevennesses. Cool metal presses against its woven underside.

CARPET FRAGMENT #97: The surface is colder and more uneven than expected. At the Museum for Islamic Art I hung on the wall, like the posters that now surround me.

FRAGMENT OF THE BREMEN 4: I was never meant to have something lying on me. I am made to keep the sea out. Not much of me is left now. Part of me still lies in the Weser, part was scrapped, and I lie here in the exhibition at the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven.

#97: I'm not whole either. I am one of 100 fragments of a carpet reconstruction.

BREMEN 4: How did you end up at a maritime museum? A carpet among ships is rather unusual.

#97: My 100 fragments are travelling the world, collecting stories about people, objects, and experiences that connect the world.

BREMEN 4: Ships certainly connect the world. Through trade, expeditions, and voyages, the world moves closer together. Around 90% of world trade is transported across the oceans. But bad things too — wars, the slave trade, and colonization — were made possible by innovations in shipping.

#97: Fascinating, I've never thought of ships that way before. What's your story? Were you a trading ship?

BREMEN 4: I was a passenger and cargo ship of the Norddeutscher Lloyd. In 1929 I was even awarded the Blue Riband for the fastest Atlantic crossing. But with the outbreak of the Second World War, I was used at the Columbuskaje in Bremerhaven as an accommodation ship for naval soldiers and as a storage depot for anti-aircraft guns. Then, on 16 March 1941, disaster struck and I burned out completely. In the attempt to extinguish me, my hull was first opened by a controlled explosion so that I could then be sunk in the Weser. Part of me was salvaged and scrapped, part of me lies here in the museum, and part of me still lies in the Weser and can be seen from the shore at low tide. It is rumoured that the fire on board was caused by the revenge of a mistreated ship's boy, though this cannot be proven.

#97: I know a thing or two about fires and bombs myself. My carpet model, the seventeenth-century Caucasian dragon carpet that I am modelled on, was also hit by an incendiary bomb during the Second World War and partly destroyed.

How exciting that we — two objects that at first glance seem so different — actually have so much in common.

BREMEN 4: We have even more in common than that. What do you know about recycling?

The carpet fragment's silence speaks for itself.

BREMEN 4: You are a reconstruction of a carpet. What happened to the original carpet after the incendiary bomb?

#97: The carpet was preserved and painstakingly restored and pieced back together by conservators.

BREMEN 4: So the museum decided the carpet was worth keeping. In recycling, that question comes first: what is worth keeping? What is waste? And how can new value be generated from materials? Recycling and restoration are both processes, or actions, that give objects and materials renewed value. Steel from ships, which is often of particularly high quality, can be used for buildings, the car industry, or ship spare parts. The idea is to create a kind of cycle in which little waste is produced and most materials can be used elsewhere. In theory, though, this is often easier said than done, since many composite materials cannot be separated again and simply end up as waste.

#97: So that's how the waste ends up in India, for example.

BREMEN 4: Exactly. Waste is a global issue, just as ship recycling is a global issue. Waste is sold cheaply abroad, where some of it is sorted and reused, but a large share ends up on enormous landfills. Under the Basel Convention, ships flying an EU flag or owned by EU owners may not be recycled outside the EU, because the quantity of hazardous substances built into them classifies them as special waste. Nevertheless, many shipowners find ways to bring their ships to South Asia, for example by selling them to so-called “cash buyers.” Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh benefit from the ships' steel, which meets their steel needs in many other industries. However, there is little protection for workers and the environment, and accidents happen frequently.

#97: Why do the workers put up with that? Can't they work somewhere else?

BREMEN 4: Often they have no other way to support their families. They need the wages. But that is often no different in the textile industry either.

#97: But then isn't the responsibility on Europe's side, to stop bringing the ships there in the first place?

BREMEN 4: That would also mean that people there no longer have work. It's important to tackle the problem from several sides. On the one hand, working conditions in South Asia need to be improved and stricter rules introduced to protect people and the environment. On the other hand, European shipping companies bear responsibility for recycling their ships sustainably, fairly, and safely. Whether that happens in South Asia or at a European recycling yard remains to be seen.

#97: That's a truly relevant and complex topic. Thank you for telling me about ship recycling. It seems the subject of recycling is similar across many industries, regardless of whether the material in question is fabric, metal, or other recyclables. It's a global system with global responsibility, and at every stage of the supply chain, in every country, only a small part of the objects' story becomes visible — a part that contributes to the larger recycling system. A global issue with local roots. As with the carpet reconstruction: when one part is missing, a fragment of the story is missing too.

Would the conversation really unfold this way? In anthropology, according to Karl-Josef Pazzini (2014), a fragment is an act, or the result of an act, that breaks or shatters something. A whole is split apart and ceases to exist. Similar to the ships on the beach, the carpet replica was cut apart, split, and separated. The wholeness of the replica no longer exists. Yet, as with recycling, reassembly can bring forth something new through recomposition.

This thought experiment shows that different fragments, however different they may seem at first glance, can also share commonalities and stories that connect them. What connects the BREMEN 4 and the dragon carpet is that both were destroyed by a bomb and a fire. Yet in both cases it was decided that the fragments were worth keeping, and that the museum should ensure that old stories are not forgotten and new stories can emerge, by placing them in new contexts through different exhibitions and encounters. A special cultural dialogue between a ship and a carpet.

I place carpet fragment #97 back into its protective cover. Now it may continue its journey. I'm curious what stories it will still gather along the way.

As a Bangladeshi professional living and working in Germany, I experience this not only as a concept but as daily reality. Over time, I have learned that identity is not something you either keep intact or lose completely when you move. It is something you learn to carry with care. Living in a new place can sharpen your awareness of what you bring with you such as values, perspectives and ways of seeing. It also teaches us what we can learn from others. This is not always an easy process. But it can be profoundly enriching. It can make you more attentive and more empathetic. It can also make you grateful for institutions like museums that create spaces where many stories can exist side by side.

Museums can be such spaces when they do more than display objects, and instead cultivate dialogue. A program like CulturalxCollabs – Weaving the Future is important because it recognizes what a textile already demonstrates: that culture is created through relationships. Weaving is a fitting metaphor, because a woven surface only becomes strong through interdependence. One thread alone cannot become a rug. Strength comes from connection, from crossing and joining, from tension held in balance. The beauty of the pattern emerges not because the threads are identical, but because they work together. This is precisely how cultural diversity enriches our lives. It does not demand that we erase our differences; it invites us to place them in conversation. It offers more ways to interpret the world, more skills to solve problems, more artistic languages to express meaning. It allows us to recognize ourselves from new angles. Sometimes we discover unexpected familiarity in what we assumed was foreign. Sometimes we learn that what we considered universal is actually specific and that other universals exist alongside it. The rug fragment also reminds me of another vital point: heritage is not only monumental. We often think of heritage as grand architecture, famous sites, or nationally celebrated histories. But heritage also lives in objects made for daily life: textiles, tools, photographs, letters, songs, even the frozen canned food of the heroic age in Antarctica. These carry the intimacy of lived experience. They hold the presence of ordinary people whose names may not be recorded, but whose creativity shaped their worlds. To value such heritage is to value human life in its fullness, not just its official narratives.

In Antarctica, heritage professionals work with modest traces: small structures, everyday items, marks left by routine labour and survival. They may not look dramatic, but they are deeply human. Likewise, a rug fragment may seem small, yet it contains social history: who made it, for what purpose, what knowledge was needed, who used it, what aesthetic choices were valued, and what networks enabled its materials and motifs. All remind us that the past is often preserved in what appears ordinary until we learn how to see and how to value it.