Fragment No. 99

What Remains Woven

When the carpet fragment arrived, my first thoughts were not about its history, its age, or even the long journey it had taken across airports and borders to reach me. What came to mind immediately was Sudan.

For years, I have approached objects as vessels of time; artifacts preserve not history itself, but the traces of human passage through it. Yet war alters our relationship to material things. Suddenly, small objects become capable of carrying what geography itself can no longer hold: memory, belonging, and the fragile sensation of continuity.

A carpet, after all, is never a single thing.

It is made of hundreds of knots, thousands of interwoven threads, spaces of emptiness, and colours that exist beside one another without consuming each other entirely. No single thread creates the carpet on its own, and no single colour monopolizes its beauty. Its true value lies in the way disparate elements intersect to form a coherent whole.

That is why the carpet reminded me of Sudan.

Sudan, too, was woven through centuries of crossings, migrations, collisions, and entanglements. A place where Africa meets the Arab world, where the desert meets the Nile, where Sufi traditions coexist with popular music, and where dialects that bear little resemblance to one another still inhabit the same everyday life. In Sudan, as in a carpet, the threads cannot easily be separated; each one passes over and beneath another, each colour giving new meaning to the one beside it.

What has always fascinated me about historical objects is not their rarity, but the marks of human contact they carry. A genuine artifact does not emerge fully formed from an isolated culture; it is shaped gradually through encounter: one hand adds, another transports, a third repurposes it within an entirely different context. Some objects therefore feel less like products of a single moment than accumulations of long histories of movement and exchange.

Perhaps this is why I struggle to think of Sudan as something fixed or homogeneous. There is something in its very formation that resists purity. Its historical layers do not rest quietly upon one another; they overlap, collide, and leave mutual traces continuously. It is as though the country was never built once and for all, but repeatedly reshaped through movement, displacement, coexistence, and rupture.

And war, at its core, is nothing more than a violent attempt to halt this complexity.

An attempt to impose rigid boundaries upon something that was formed, from the beginning, through entanglement.

War does not merely kill people; it attempts to tear apart the fabric itself.

It seeks to sever the threads that bind people to one another, to transform difference into fear and diversity into division. Suddenly, colours that once coexisted peacefully become causes for conflict, and what once represented richness becomes a source of suspicion. The threads begin to separate, and voids appear where cohesion once existed.

Since the beginning of the current war, this unravelling has become painfully visible.

Homes left empty. Neighbourhoods stripped of recognition. Families scattered across cities and exiles. People carrying their country only in memory. Even the places we once imagined to be permanent — museums, libraries, archives, universities — suddenly revealed themselves to be fragile and vulnerable to disappearance.

As I looked at the carpet fragment, I found myself thinking about the meaning of “fabric” itself.

A carpet remains strong not because its threads are identical, but because of the knots that bind difference to difference. The small knot no one notices is precisely what prevents the fabric from collapsing. Perhaps societies, too, depend upon these invisible knots: trust, neighbourliness, shared memory, familiar songs, the smell of coffee inside homes, fleeting conversations between strangers who nonetheless feel they belong to the same place.

War attempts to undo these knots.

It tries to make people see themselves as isolated colours rather than parts of a larger composition. Culture, however, persistently attempts to weave things back together.

Perhaps that is why the CulturalxCollabs project felt so close to the way I think about Sudan. Culture is not merely a luxury or an artistic activity reserved for times of peace. Sometimes, it is the final means through which we prevent the fabric from tearing completely apart. When people sing old songs in exile, cook the same food they once prepared at home, or tell stories to their children in their original dialects, they are, in truth, reweaving the threads that war tried to sever.

Even this small fragment from a distant museum seemed to me part of that process.

A piece separated from a larger carpet, beginning a new journey among different people, carrying with it a story about movement, exchange, and the mutual shaping of cultures. As if reminding us that beautiful things are not born from isolation, but from the me.