LG NATUR #3.1: Hira Nabi – Short Film Screening

All That Perishes at the Edge of Land (2019), 30 minutes. The decommissioned container ship Ocean Master enters into a dialogue with the workers at the Gadani shipyard site. The conversation moves between dreams, desires and places that are understood as home, and the violence inscribed in the act of dismantling a ship. As the workers recall their homeland and the families they left behind, the long working days continue to melt into each other, and they are forced to face the realities of their work, in which they face death on a daily basis. How can they survive and look forward to a future? The film focuses on the bodies, lives (and afterlives) and the structures necessary for survival that are involved in the dismantling, and asks for consideration of the costs and the naming of responsibilities.

Hira Nabi is a visual artist and filmmaker from Pakistan. She works with the media of film, performance, and text to collaboratively reflect on the disappearance of different worlds, aftermath, plural temporalities, and work infrastructures. In doing so, she links stories of colonial exploitation with ongoing violence and formulates gestures of care in order to find justice and dignity in addition to mere survival. An important part of her practice is to collect and archive testimonies in the wake of destruction and disappearance. In her work, witnessing is an act of radical possibility that unleashes immense potential for collective responsibility and love.