Afghanistan National Museum Motto

Yesterday I went for lunch at the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University to see Nancy Dupree. I count the pleasure of her company among the most precious gifts I received from this city. We spent a couple of hours together and we ate an enormous plate of garlic beans and a bowl of sour yogurt.

Nancy is an amazing raconteur and an inexhaustible source of enchanting stories: her intimate knowledge of the country offers, to those who have the privilege to listen, a vertiginous journey across space and time.

Over the years, it never happened to me to spend some time with her and leave without a memorable story to cherish and remember.

Yesterday, when I arrived to her office, she was working on a photo-gallery about the pre-historic tools that are part of the collection of the National Museum. As a cover image for the gallery she wanted to use a photo of the façade of the museum before it was destroyed during the Civil War. She told me she went looking in her extensive photo archive and to her great surprise she could not find any image of that kind. She then went to see the director of the museum to ask him for a copy from their own archives, but he said they did not have any even there. Ever more surprised, she reached out to those who were in town in those years or could have had access to documents of that time. Nothing. It seems that before the Civil War no one considered taking a photo of the façade.

Her story ended there and our conversation moved on, but the thought of the photo that wasn’t there stayed with me.

There are so many moments and details that, there and then, appear entirely unremarkable. There are so many things that we take for granted and let slip away without thinking twice. It is strange to think that these details can then come back unannounced and reveal themselves through their absence in an unexpected future. It is strange to think that they end up becoming witnesses of a past that has left no visual trace.