Rethinking the Restitutionary Moment: What Next?

Photo: Restitution ceremony with Ysleta del sur Pueblo (United States) in Wereldmuseum Leiden, 2025. Photo: Boudewijn Bollmann.

This conference is conceived of as a series of provocations from distinguished international scholars who have been involved, both theoretically and practically, in the discussions around the question of what to do with the objects collected during the colonial period that now reside in European Museums. Each presenter is asked to respond to the question 'what now, what next?'. These presentations will be followed by extended conversations with the different researchers from the Pressing Matter project about their initial aims at the beginning of the project, what we have done, and how these aims may have been revised over the period of the project. Importantly, the conference explores what further work must be done to achieve the kinds of changes that Pressing Matter had imagined at the start of the project: to explore how we might conceive of restitution beyond its programmatic and policy limitations, but also to address the questions that this restitutionary moment raises in national and international contexts about living within the afterlives of colonialism.

Critical work remains to be done around restitution, with the many shifts that have happened globally over the last four years. Questions of restitution have become increasingly urgent concerns across several European countries in the last five years. Moreover, several countries of origin established their own frameworks for restitution that have been directed towards different national governments and museums across Europe. While there may have been initial resistance to returning objects, in the Netherlands alone a national restitution policy now has been implemented and there exist some general consensus about the importance of restitution. Approximately 1,000 objects have been returned, including objects to Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, the United States, and Mexico. What possibilities have these changing policies and returns opened and what have they foreclosed? And importantly, what does it mean differently for Europe, in this case the Netherlands, and for the countries or cultural groups to which objects have been returned. In what ways are the relationships developed in these processes of return, opening different forms of relation beyond older colonial structures?

A more detailed conference program will follow shortly.

Questions animating our interests include, but are not limited to:

• How are the discussions on restitution happening in social settings outside of Europe, among others Indonesia and Ghana? What are the futures of such discussions and how might these local discussions influence the global context?
• How might European colonial collections – often collected within the frameworks of colonial science, racism, and physical anthropology – form a critical understanding of the impact of colonialism in different contexts?
• What might artistic practices do to reinterpret colonial collections and help societies address the afterlives of colonial violence and extraction?
• What urgent steps must be taken in Europe to better care for ancestral and human remains collected in colonial contexts? What might it mean to take the dead, and their spirits, seriously as European museums come to terms with these histories of alienation?
• What role can museums and universities play in shaping heritage practices around contemporary law and notions of ownership that do not reproduce colonial logics? Does it make sense to think about these practices through the notion of 'repairing'?
• How can European governments 'restitute' to countries of origin without resuscitating colonial modes of relating?

The two-day conference is preceded by a Brainwash Special with Achille Mbembe at the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam on Wednesday 26 November 2025, from 19:00-22:00. In this Brainwash Special, Wayne Modest, Director of Content at Wereldmuseum Amsterdam, will be in conversation with Achille Mbembe to discuss the fractures that define our societies today. How do we hold on to solidarity in a world that seems to divide rather than connect? And what might a future look like in which everyone truly matters?

Thursday 27 November, Grote Zaal, Wereldmuseum Leiden

Friday 28 November, Grote Zaal, Wereldmuseum Leiden

Pressing Matter is a four-year international research program about colonial legacies in museums, financed by the Dutch National Science Agenda (NWA-NWO) and coordinated by the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. One of the main partners is the Wereldmuseum. Pressing Matter investigates the potentialities of ‘colonial objects’ to support societal reconciliation with the colonial past and its afterlives, and to deal with conflicting claims by different stakeholders for these objects within museums. The project connects fundamental theories of valuation and property to postcolonial debates on heritage to these societal debates and aims to develop and test, firstly, new theoretical models of value and ownership and, secondly, new forms of return that address yet move beyond the current approaches to heritage restitution, whilst developing a theory of object potentialities grounded in the entangled, multipolar histories in which colonial objects were collected, kept and made meaningful.