Rethinking the Restitutionary Moment: What Next?

This talk explores the affordances and challenges of artistic engagements with questions of provenance — origin, ownership, value, narrative, and justice. Artistic Provenance Research (APR) shows how artists approach provenance not merely as historical reconstruction but as a creative, spiritual, and political practice, and how artistic methods illuminate gaps, silences, and inconclusive narratives that conventional research may leave untouched. I present APR as a way to broaden the evidentiary arsenal, redistribute authority, and to support, enrich, and mobilize conventional provenance work — offering transformative possibilities for the current restitutionary moment.

The museum has always been a place of storytelling. Whose stories, and who is telling them, is a foundational part of the power dynamic between cultural preservation and community revitalization. As we continue to discuss and address restitution, or processes of repatriation/rematriation, we can also imagine a renewed storytelling—a restoration of sovereignty over one’s own narratives, emphasizing emergent vitalities and collaborative and reciprocal relationships; a narrative restitution. With foundations in anthropology and Indigenous ways of knowing, this presentation examines how poetry and art can help shape changes in this landscape, providing new vocabularies, new lenses, and new futurities for museums, communities, and cultures.

There are some instances when property is taken from an individual or a group and the appropriate remedy is to give the thing (or something approximating its value) back. In other instances, property is taken as part of a larger strategy of dehumanization or infantilization. In these instances, compensating people for things taken is not enough because they lost more than their property. The takings was also an assault on their dignity. This dual harm is called a dignity taking.

The appropriate remedy for a dignity taking is something more than mere reparations (i.e. compensation for things taken). Instead, dignity restoration, which addresses deprivations of both property and dignity, is required. Dignity restoration compensates individuals and communities for things taken through processes that affirm their humanity and embrace their agency.

The return of objects from the Netherlands to Indonesia is celebrated as a form of victory in the republic’s narrative of decolonization. Yet, what exactly are these objects returning to? Can return even be possible? Dispossession required the destruction of the ontologies which make possible their meaning and their performative role in these societies. The return of these objects from modern institutions in the Netherlands toward another set of modern institutions in Indonesia has the potential of replicating the same epistemic violence. We argue that the only way in which restitution can occur, and the objects can ‘return’ is to make it into a pedagogical project of citizenship. Restitution as pedagogy allows us to rethink the possibilities of modern heritage institutions as places to reconnect communities and values in order to rehabilitate new forms of ontology. Restitution as pedagogy allows us to implement decoloniality through practice and engagement with the ‘objects of heritage’. Restitution requires solidarity, the formation of community and co-production with other people, communities and ecologies. It thus starts with us thinking about the relationship between community and the museums, universities, government and heritage associations.

Four years into the current “restitutionary moment”, this presentation asks what comes after policy breakthroughs and spectacular returns between the Netherlands and Indonesia. Drawing on my involvement in recent restitution processes, I treat repatriation as a battleground where global crises, racial capitalism and colonial afterlives converge. Museum collections appear here as archives of capture, of land, bodies and futures, rather than neutral heritage.

I argue that new European policies can inadvertently stabilise an unequal order if Europe continues to define the terms of repair, expertise and “capacity building”. Instead of reading recent returns as closure, I ask what they open in Indonesia: new claims over history and land, new frictions between state institutions, communities and experts, and new imaginaries of shared ownership.

My discussion will seek to establish that restitution of collections from colonial contexts transcends the sheer return of these collections to nations and communities of origin. I will suggest, with particular reference to Africa that, restitution is seen as a process of mobilizing the collections in ways that will give them new lives and agency to enhance the production of alternative knowledge, the healing of ills that colonial encounters on the continent engendered, and the building of forward-looking relationships among Africans, and between Africans and their neighbors of the world. The discussion will draw on information I have gathered through research into what restitution is, through provenance research I have conducted into various items Carl Spiess of the North German Missionary Society collected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from the former German Togoland territory and through my engagement with some restitution cases in Ghana.

In this talk Dan Hicks introduces his new book Every Monument Will Fall: a story of remembering and forgetting, an excavation of the unfinished colonial legacies of 19th-century British imperialism in statues, collections, and universities. The book's argument about "the four As" (Archaeology, Anthropology, Art and Architecture) and "the four Ms" (monuments, museums, memory and militarism) will be introduced — with reference to questions of transparency, ethics and enduring carcerality in relation to ancestral human remains in legacy colonial museums.

The paper examines how museums can be approached as spaces deeply entangled with histories of death through the framework of sedimo (of the spirit and ancestors). It asks questions around the challenges that arise when encountering unsettled spirits within these collections and spaces. Drawing from Dan Hicks’ notion of necrography (2020), the paper analyses two museum cases: the DITSONG National Museum of Cultural History in South Africa and the Musée d’ethnographie de Neuchâtel in Switzerland, foregrounding the perspectives and experiences of a caregiver who is both a curator and ngaka (healer). Central to the paper is the advancement of Letšema, a communal spiritual practice grounded in collective action as both a method of return and a form of resistance. Letšema is presented as a tool for navigating and intervening in the spiritual dynamics of museum spaces and objects, particularly those enmeshed in ancestral entanglements. The paper argues for the embracing of letšema as an ongoing, communal approach to restitution and care, suggesting it offers a means to continuously address the complex spiritual legacies within museum collections.