Sew La Ti Embroidery: Afghanistan

Residents of Bamiyan got a rare opportunity over the weekend: a chance to once again see giant Buddhas that have been piles of rubble for over a decade. 3-D projection technology has already been used to resurrect dead music legends and pipe busy politicians into campaign rallies, and now it’s been employed to recreate a cultural icon that watched over this valley in Afghanistan for more than 1,500 years.

Bamiyan Buddhas rise again... in 3-D — **The historic Buddhas of Bamiyan statues have made a return to the**
**Afghan valley as 3D light projections [Credit: AFP]**

The two Buddhas of Bamiyan were constructed in the sixth century, at a time when the area was a site of pilgrimage and learning for Buddhists. Both Buddhas were carved out of sandstone cliffs and stood at well over 100 feet, and at one point painted and gilded. They managed to withstand the introduction of Islam to the region and the armies of Genghis Khan, but were unable to survive past the first year of the 21st century. The Taliban destroyed the Buddhas in March 2001.

“These idols have been gods of the infidels,” declared Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, in marking the statues for destruction. “First they fired at the Buddhas with tanks and artillery shells,” recalled one Afghan who participated in the attack. “But when that was ineffective, they planted explosives to try to destroy them.” When the Buddhas finally crumbled, Taliban fighters “were firing weapons into the air, they were dancing and they brought nine cows to slaughter as a sacrifice.” The monuments had endured for centuries, only to disappear in a matter of weeks.

In the ensuing years, UNESCO officials, Afghan authorities, and local residents have failed to reach a consensus about the best way to address the devastation. In 2005, the artist Hiro Yamagata proposed implementing a laser-show system to conjure images of the Buddhas, but the project was never implemented. “The void left by the two destroyed Buddha figures is appalling, it rouses an emotion almost more powerful than their once tranquil presence did for centuries,” Frederic Bobin wrote in The Guardian earlier this year.

Now a solution, albeit a temporary one, has arrived—and from an unlikely source. According to Ali Latifi, a Kabul-based journalist for the Los Angeles Times who witnessed the 3-D projections on Saturday and Sunday, the holograms, cast from projectors mounted on scaffolding, were the work of a Chinese couple who are currently traveling the world and filming a documentary. They had been deeply moved by the statues’ destruction in 2001, and, according to Latifi, decided to undertake the project and add Bamiyan to their itinerary. Latifi said that the couple fine-tuned the projections on a mountainside in China and then, after receiving approval from UNESCO and the Afghan government, brought the system to Afghanistan. The projections were not widely publicized, but over 150 people came to see the spectacle. Crowds remained well into the night, Latifi said, and some people played music while others looked on.

Author: Edward Delman | Source: The Atlantic [June 12, 2015]

Saving Mes Aynak, which was screened at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina, last month, is the story of an imminent archaeological tragedy in Afghanistan that seems like a fait accompli.

Scholars rush to save Mes Aynak — **The director of Saving Mes Aynak, Brent Huffman, surveying a Buddhist stupa**
**at the archaeological site [Credit: Saving Mes Aynak]**

Mes Aynak is a vast site in a mountainous area south of Kabul, near Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan and adjacent to Taliban supply routes. The area is roughly the size of the city of Pompeii in Italy. Archaeologists say it is one of the richest sites in the country, with objects dating back 5,000 years. Excavations were conducted recently with the support of the French government and continue with urgency with a skeleton Afghan crew. Yet more than 90% of the site still remains unexamined.

It is almost sure to be under-examined. Mes Aynak is also the site of extensive copper deposits, which explains why it was a trading centre for centuries. The name Mes Anynak means “little source of copper,” although “little” understates the case. Those deposits are now under contract for extraction by China Metallurgical Group Corporation, a state-owned Chinese mining conglomerate that plans to begin mining the site this year. The copper underneath is said to be worth $100 billion, according to the Afghan government. That is an amount that might make the occasional Taliban attack seem tolerable.

The fight over Mes Aynak is the subject of this documentary film by Brent Huffman. The main narrator of the grim tale is the Afghan archaeologist Qadir Temori. With the help of French archaeologists, Temori and his team have unearthed temples, fortifications, objects and stupas (memorials) that reflect the Buddhist and Hellenistic styles common to the region. But China Metallurgical Group Corporation has built an extensive modern camp for workers and is poised to remove the hills and the ancient remains beneath with modern bulldozers.

To call this a David and Goliath story is like saying $100 billion is a modest incentive. The American archaeologist Mark Kenoyer, a specialist in Afghan and Pakistani cultures, compares bulldozing the site to submerging the city of Atlantis. The French archaeologist Philippe Marquis calls it “the tip of the iceberg.”We are told in interviews with Afghan officials that the proposed mine will enrich the country with $7 billion dollars of economic activity.

We are also told by former government employees that the minister responsible for the deal— which involved a Chinese payment of some $3 billion to the minister—is living in a luxurious new house. (That official has since resigned and has accused his successor of corruption, Huffman says.)

International protests have not made much difference. Alarmed archaeologists and Buddhists around the world achieved a brief delay by raising their voices, yet the mining seems set to begin.

Saving Mes Aynak does not fit the usual contours of films about art. There are exquisite objects on screen that came fr om recent excavations, although most of them are too recently unearthed to be conserved and exhibited in a delicately-lit jewel-box museum context. They are hardly the proven treasures that might induce politicians to fight for preservation.

A chilling parallel to this film came in another documentary at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Overburden by Chad Stevens examines the practice of mountaintop removal to extract coal quickly and cheaply over a vast area, with a fraction of the workers required in the conventional deep mining process. Citizens in West Virginia who feared the destruction of their homes and water sources locked horns with a huge coal company, Massey Energy (which has since been sold to Alpha Natural Resources), and coalminers who were fighting for their jobs.

Saving Mes Aynak involves a hauntingly similar standoff. Overburden is the mining term that refers to rock and dirt between the surface and mineral deposits. In Mes Aynak, 5,000 years of culture are the overburden.

Huffman shows grim video of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in 2002, yet at a time when the destruction of ancient cultures is a stated policy of the Islamic State, Saving Mes Aynak presents us with a different crisis: the horror of business as usual. Under governments wh ere conservation doesn’t count for much, the race for resources runs faster than rescue archaeology.

Author: David D'Arcy | Source: The Art Newspaper [May 30, 2015]

Sew La Ti Embroidery:
Afghanistan

Central Asia: Bamiyan Buddhas rise again... in 3-D

Central Asia: Scholars rush to save Mes Aynak