Elephants & Squirrels

This insightful and engrossing film follows Sri Lankan artist Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige as she retraces the colonial-era journey of the Sarasin cousins, two Swiss men who collected numerous specimens and artefacts, including human remains, from the region and took them back to Europe for ‘scientific research’. The cousins, who were also lovers, founded a museum in Basel, Switzerland, where countless artefacts from Sri Lanka and elsewhere are still housed in museum archives. The film takes an in-depth look at this history, while also exploring the cultural and logistical complexity of returning the objects in the present day. In following Arachchige’s journey, Elephants & Squirrels reveals the various ways in which knowledge is controlled and hierarchised, both in the past and in the modern world. But, as the film makes evident, the colonial moment has not yet fully passed, and attitudes from previous centuries continue to influence the current conversation around restitution and reparations.