25 November 2025
Photo: day 1 of the Repatriation and Reappropriation of the Cultural-Historical Heritage of the Ñuu Savi. Photo: Dr. Omar Aguilar Sánchez
PUBLIC EVENT | November 25, 2025 | 10.30 - 12.00 | Gerbrandszaal, Wereldmuseum Leiden
For this public event, the Research Center for Material Culture and the Pressing Matter research project are pleased to welcome the Nchivi Ñuu Savi collective for a presentation and discussion on the outcomes of their most recent Repair Lab* on 8-9 November 2025 in Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca.
About the event
This in-person gathering focused on the question of repatriation and re-appropriation of the historical-cultural heritage of Ñuu Savi in Oaxaca. The gathering was open to the public, and more specifically to indigenous peoples, their municipal authorities, as well as communitarian museums committees and coordinators of education and culture in the region.
Their presentation in the Wereldmuseum Leiden will focus on the outcomes of their Repair Lab and offer further reflection on the questions and comments that came up during their gathering. This presentation will also offer an opportunity for discussion with the members of the Nchivi Ñuu Savi collective and the committee of the Communitarian Museum Yucu Saa. Following their presentation, there will be a moment of Q&A, moderated by Professor Chiara de Cesari.
*part of the Pressing Matter research project, the aim of the Repair Lab is to organise workshops and meetings in various countries in which multidisciplinary teams of researchers, artists, curators, cultural policymakers and activists, amongst others, will work on and test together new models for ownership and return of objects.
About the Nchivi Ñuu Savi collective
The Nchivi Ñuu Savi collective was founded with the aim of strengthening, promoting, and disseminating the language, culture, history, and rights of the People of the Rain by the Nchivi Savi themselves, or “people of the rain,” to strengthen ties and give a voice to the Mixtecs people.
About the speakers
Lic. Izaira López Sánchez is a ña’a Ñuu Savi (woman of the People of the Rain / Mixteca) and a speaker of Tu’un Savi (Language of the Rain / Mixtec). She holds a degree in International Relations from the Universidad del Mar, Huatulco Campus. She is a researcher of the Ñuu Savi, and her research focuses on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the repatriation of cultural items and ancestral remains of the Ñuu Savi.
She has completed academic placements in the Department of Indigenous Peoples, Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University, Netherlands, and at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. At the latter, she worked with the Mixtec Collection at the National Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of the American Indian.
Dr. Omar Aguilar Sánchez is tee savi (Mixtec) and holds a Doctorate in Archaeology from Leiden University, Netherlands. He is an Archaeologist by training from the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia, México. His undergraduate and doctoral research received the Alfonso Caso Award in the INAH Prizes in 2016 and 2021, respectively. In 2019, he was awarded the Mexican Government 's National Youth Prize ("Premio Nacional de la Juventud") in the Academic Achievement category.
He is a specialist in the archaeology, history, language, and anthropology of the Ñuu Savi, primarily focusing on the Mixtec codices and the link between these pictorial manuscripts and the living heritage and Mixtec language from a decolonial perspective, fostering their re-appropriation within the Pueblo de la Lluvia (People of the Rain) itself. He has been a speaker at national and international conferences in countries such as England, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the United States, Poland, and Suriname. He has also given and organized lectures and workshops in Ñuu Savi communities. He has published various articles in Tu’un Savi (Mixtec), Spanish, and English.
He works with Postcolonial Digital Humanities and is the director of the digital and educational projects "Mixtec Codices App," "Ñuu Savi Calendar," and the "Codex
Ing. Raúl López Nicolás is tee savi (Mixtec) and a Community Development Engineer from the Instituto Tecnológico de México. He currently serves as the head and curator of the Yucu Saa Community Museum, a position assigned by the community of Villa de Tututepec, Oaxaca.
In this role, he conducts workshops for youth, workshops for artisans, collaborates on research with archaeologists within the municipality, leads tours of historical sites, gives lectures, and manages the museum. He is also a teacher at the Raza de Bronze Federal Secondary School, where he teaches students of all grades in the subjects of mathematics, geography, arts, biology, and regional history.
About Pressing Matter
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.
