Image produced by Jiayao Jiang using AI tools and Adobe Photoshop

‘Fragments’ capture the incompleteness and unfinishedness of living and thinking in a fractured world. Amid climate crisis, conflict, technological disruption, and social uncertainty, fragments—ruins, partial archives, broken objects, unfinished narratives—persist not only as traces of loss, but also as sites of possibility. They demand renewed attention to what remains, and to what might yet be reassembled, reworked, or reimagined.

Rather than seeking a return to unity, ‘Afterlives of Fragments’ approaches fragmentation as a generative condition of knowledge-making. We turn to ‘(un)making’ as both an analytic process and a practice, following the movements of matter and relations as they weather, fracture, and transform. By attending to how things come apart as much as how they come into being, (un)making recognizes that creation is inseparable from dissolution. Here, patchwork, montage, and assemblage emerge as critical modes of knowing, encouraging mess, productive dissonance, and open-ended becoming.

Bridging anthropology, archaeology, art, and architecture, we invite scholars, artists, and practitioners to engage with fragments not merely as objects of study, but as ways of thinking, sensing, and collaborating. As part of CRASSH’s 25th anniversary programme, the event combines an interdisciplinary panel with an artistic workshop. Together, we seek to imagine how thinking and working with fragments can inspire new forms of inquiry, creativity, and community in a fractured world.