Zahra Malkani’s The Wanderers Taught Me Longing, the Mystics Taught Me Lament is 20-minute video accompanied by a swing made from shipyard scrap metal in Karachi, Pakistan. Rocking gently in rhythm with the lullabies, laments, and devotional songs, the swing functions as a cradle at the end of times. It invites us not only to hear, but to feel sound through the body.

The film weaves together voices, memories, and musical traditions in three languages. Mothers sing for those who are missing and have been killed. An activist in hiding recalls her disappeared father through his love of music, while a doctor sings an ambivalent lullaby passed down by her dissident mother. Alongside these contemporary testimonies, an ancient story resurfaces in which a woman makes a vow to walk, binding myth to lived experience through themes of kinship, grief, devotion, and endurance.

The work grows from Malkani’s research into the Indus Delta and the Indian Ocean, where ecological devastation and the climate crisis meet longstanding traditions of resistance. Women’s devotional chants, damaged audio files, fragments of folklore, and remembered melodies overlap into a dense sonic collage. Here, sound becomes both archive and method, emerging as an ongoing practice of political dissent.