Introduction

Despite the increasing public scrutiny of the social role of museums, many European Archaeology and Ethnography museums still possess objects from other cultures acquired in colonial and imperial contexts, under unequal circumstances between European collectors, researchers, amateurs and local communities. Since this history is almost two centuries old, its origins may seem remote and, above all, distant from the concerns that drive museum professionals today. Seen from this angle, the movement for the decolonization of museums is nothing but an anachronistic dispute with a problematic but resolved past, whose material expression museums present in a neutral fashion, claiming to honor a commitment to knowledge.

By contrast, the movement for the decolonization of museums departs from the crucial insight that the past is not over yet. The past is conceived as a contested field, whose interpretation was historically monopolized by some at the expense of many others. When it involves heritage from other cultures present in European museums, the past is almost always linked to histories of colonization that, far from being solved, extend themselves to daily oppression of people with darker complexions, and in the different opportunities and ordeals experienced by individuals according to their skin color, gender, identity and class. Since the museum is an apparatus that constructs and normalizes representations, it will never be a neutral space.

In international museum language (in English), the bodies of human beings who lived lives of their own, experienced feelings, hopes, wishes and their own dignity, and who are now held captive in the collections of museums or scientific institutions, are called ‘human remains’. Although this expression is sometimes used in a respectful way, it is always rather odd to say ‘human remains’ when one talks about people. Scientific vocabulary often creates distance in face of realities that are too hard to look at if seen without a filter. We try to play with the words and obtain an injunction: “remain human”; an appeal to remain human. Simultaneously, the word ‘human’ is also riddled with problems. Historically, it designates what is considered the ‘highest value’, praised and defended, but which has too often served the interests of only some humans, usually those in power, aiding processes of exploitation and objectification of many other individuals and of nature. Similarly, while the expression ‘human remains’ affirms the humanity of the bodies, many of those who use it keep on stuyding and exhibiting these bodies in museums, in an act of apparent cognitive dissonance.

This project has sought to start a dialogue between many voices around the exhibition of the bodies of two young Chancay Amerindians in the Carmo Archaeological Museum, Lisbon – one among many examples of ‘pasts’ and ‘futures’ yet to be opened in European museums. Since we have been unable to identify living descendants of the Chancay,^⁠ we chose a different path. Several South-American artists who share their claim to an Indigenous identity were invited to create videos in which they could take a stand. Despite never meeting in person, we were lucky enough to exchange ideas online thanks to modern media and social networks. We felt a diversity of contemporary Indigenous languages and identities could thus be presented. All the artists showed immense generosity in accepting the invitation of two artists-researchers from another part of the world, who they had never met in person, and that, looking for a new emotional and cultural relationship, addressed problematic and painful issues of the collective common past: the artists Alberto Alvares (also known as Tupã Ra’y, of the Guarani people), Denilson Baniwa (of the Baniwa people), Ibã Huni Kuin (also known as Isaías Sales, of the Huni Kuin people, also known as Caixanuá), Jaider Esbell (of the Makuxi people) and Marilya Hinostroza (of the Wanka people).

Their diverse and rich video responses addressed two questions we had posed: How do you stand towards the exhibition of the two bodies in cases in the museum? What could be done to dignify their memory and the representation of Indigenous peoples? All the videos potently affirm different ways of existing and resisting via performative acts, works that are poetic reinterpretations of the bodies on display in the museum, or that resonate for us as moments of sharing and informed reflection.

Alberto Alvares’ video stands between documentary and fiction, as he acts out the transfer of knowledge from the elder to the younger through oral tradition, treasuring this element of emotional, cultural and communal cohesion. He also refers to the situation at the Carmo Museum, by mentioning the imprisoned spirits of the bodies kept in cases.

Denilson Baniwa reenacts the apparatus of the glass display case and, claiming an oppressed cultural identity, puts himself in the place of the two captive Indigenous bodies, feeling and striving to make us feel what he empathizes and identifies with as well as suffers from. Yet he does so in an accusatory tone, as an extension of his activist struggles for the rights of Indigenous peoples.

Ibã Huni Kuin allowed us to use a pre-existing video (recorded during the exhibition ¡Mira! Artes Visuais Contemporâneas dos Povos Indígenas, produced by the Núcleo Transdisciplinar de Pesquisas Literaterras). He speaks about his culture and its worldview, departing from his research on body-image, developed as part of MAHKU – Movement of Huni Kuin Artists. The video shows what representations of Indigenous identity he would like to see in contemporary museums.

Jaider Esbell uses a series of objects, the performing potential of his hands and a cellphone camera to create a mixture of video art and animist evocation. He plays with the tension, via sound, between small objects with great emotional, cultural and spiritual value (small axes, grinding stones, a beaded cloth) and the glasses and golden frames that are seen to protect the museums’ ‘heritage’, but imprison the Indigenous bodies. He also alludes to the golden frames that, on top of Room 4, praise the 19^th century men who were part of an European association of archaeologists, including Januário Correia de Almeida, who brought the bodies from Peru to Lisbon.

Marilya Hinostroza also adopts the power of art in the projection of her voice, here in a direct way. She proudly displays her large paintings of Peruvian women as portrayed wearing the clothes of her people. In a confessional manner, she looks directly at the camera and raises ethical questions from her lugar de fala.

To sum up, the five artists responded to the museum’s politics of visual hierarchy with art, a field where their identities encounter a space for affirmation and introspection; a space where they may reinvent, reconnecting the past with the possibility of a better future.

Alongside reaching out to artists, we invited thinkers from the fields of Museum Studies and Visual Culture, as well as and museum professionals with backgrounds in discussing decolonization, who were asked to share their thoughts and experiences. They write from diverse places (Europe, Africa, South and North America), having in common their commitment to looking for images of what could be another kind of museum. In some cases, this is an empty museum, or a place resembling something other than a museum; in others, it is a museum-home that houses a plurality of perspectives and narratives. In other cases still, it appears to be similar to the museums we already have, but it is open to change in order to rise to the challenges of the present.

A third element was added to the audiovisual proposals of the artists and the written reflections of academics and museum professionals: an unanticipated performance in the Carmo Museum itself. The performance can be watched on the website that gathers all of the project’s materials (http://sites.google.com/view/otempodashuacas-EN). It starts as an unofficial guided tour of the museum’s Room 4, which visualizes a time of power over the other in order to replace it by another kind of time, where one searches for healing, dignity and empathy towards the lived experience of others, those separated by place and time. This complex and multipersonal time approaches, and brings us closer to, the ‘huacas’.

The term ‘huaca’, suggested by the Peruvian artist Marilya Hinostroza in one of our online conversations during the preparation of this project, means ‘sacred’ in Quechua language.^⁠ It denotes revered places, burial grounds, as well as the deceased to whom one pays homage, always signifying respect and reverence. With this set of images and thoughts we aim to raise questions and start restoring dignity to the bodies of the two young Chancay exposed in the museum, joining in community with the dead and with those who cared for them a long time ago. We firmly believe that this act connects to the political struggles and right of self-determination of Indigenous peoples today. Therefore, we extend an invitation of listening and of exercising another kind of seeing, modes which are not hardened inside the traditional museum setting, and are instead able to meet the world in its complexity and unpredictability. To that end, we must first recognize the historically constructed power imbalances that permeate our day-to-day life, in order to weave new ways of relating to each other, inside and outside the museum setting. We must open our heart and wish for the arrival of a new time, the time of the huacas.

From subject to object and back: some questions to get out of the display case

If we tried to enter the Carmo Archaeological Museum and roam through its rooms with the sense of estrangement of those who see something for the first time, we would surely be struck by the presence of two Peruvian mummies displayed in cases in one of the rooms. How did they get here? Where did they come from? Who are these people? To go through the museum and exit it as if the situation was normal and commonplace should make us think about the social function of museums.

After more than five centuries after the beginning of the conquest and colonization of American peoples and the invention of the Indian as that conquered other, we need to stop looking at museums naively and start asking: Who are the people represented in these spaces? What relationships of “othering” do they represent and actualize? Which kinds of power are asserted and naturalized? Who gets to occupy the museum as subjects, and who is in there merely as objects?

The relationship that was set in motion with the “discovery” of America relied on severe inequalities, constructing “alterity” in extreme ways as the legacy of coloniality. It is clear that all relationships do not only have a symbolic or conceptual expression, but also a material one. This is very clear in the case of museums: “others” are integrated in the museum, captured by its cases, exposed outside their cultural grid, taken away from their contexts of meaning. Reflection is required about how these Indigenous objects and human remains ended up in museums, who decides what is exhibited and how. Did someone demand the restitution of the human remains? And there is an additional question left to be asked: Who visits the museum expecting to see the mummies?

During the years I worked at the Educational Service section of the Museo de La Plata (Argentina), dialogue with visitors who came to see the mummies that were no longer on display was usual, reiterated and it motivated profound reflection. The museum removed human remains from its exhibitions and converted the rooms into spaces to talk about this theme. Their absence was more provocative than their exhibition. In that sense, the history of Museo de La Plata is very meaningful. Its foundation, in 1884, happened while the process of border expansion and war against the Indian was in full swing. Its first collections included Indigenous objects and bodies taken as a result of the brutal clash that aimed to remove the Indian from the nation, restricting their presence to the museum space. For many years, museums held the bodies of Indigenous caciques whose individual identity was known. This history started to be reversed in 1989, when the museum received its first formal requests for restitution. Since then and until today, national laws have been passed and protocols have been formulated leading to several restitution cases. Not only that: the debate became much more complex and the museum defined a policy of non-exhibition of human remains. This theme undergoes another turnaround, with reflection about the musealization of death, but only the death of others.

Is it enough to say, as ICOM [International Council of Museums] states, that these are “sensitive” human remains? What does it mean to see Peruvian mummies on display today in Carmo Museum’s exhibition? Can we see them as people, as individuals? Can we fathom the cultural other? And if we do, how do we position ourselves? And what is the position of the museum? Coming back to the function of museums and what we can make of them, one thing must be clear: the museum cannot be a space for indifference.

“‘Theory’ is not just words on a page. It’s also things that are made”

An interview with Nicholas Mirzoeff by Inês Beleza Barreiros

It is clear that Visual Culture is not possible without a political and ethical dimension to it. How do you envision the actual role of the field in this movement to decolonize knowledge and the imagination or, as you have put in a recent article in The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, how to actually “empty the museum, decolonize the curriculum, and open theory”?

“Empty the museum” means that all expropriated cultural property should be returned to its appropriate owners. The Elgin Marbles should go back to Athens, where an empty museum awaits them. In Ramallah, the Palestine Museum is similarly empty of contents. When the Jewish Museum in Berlin, designed by Daniel Libeskind first opened, it too was empty and many people thought it was more expressive like that. One crucial item is the return of Indigenous cultural property, especially sacred objects and human remains. In the Carmo here in Lisbon, the bodies of two Amerindians sit in glass cases in the library: what better “case” can be made for the decolonization of museums? In the US, many Indigenous objects have been returned under a legal framework designed to support Native peoples’ claims. There are still plenty of objects to look at. My goal is to imagine what a “museum” would look like if it was not filled with expropriated and non-specific materials. Places like the Metropolitan Museum, the Louvre or the British Museum would be very different. A collection like Tate Britain, centered around Turner’s bequest to the nation, would not change so much. The goal is not to create nationalist agendas, however. It’s already the case that the museum is a service industry, devoted to the circulation of (tourist) capital more than anything else. What if there were spaces open to local communities and artists of all kinds within these palaces of culture?

In Portugal, the memory of the empire (1415-1974) lingers and, like any other memory, is partial, concealing. Official memory is still one of heroicism, with the terms “discoveries” or “expansion” prevailing over “colonialism.” The massive role of Portugal in the slave trade - condemning 5,848,266 people into slavery (almost half of the 12,500,000 total enslaved) – and the persistence of forced labor after the abolition of slavery, in 1869, until as late as the 1960s are ignored widely. Furthermore, there is no memorial to the victims of Slavery that could counter the imperial discourse that Lisbon as a city emanates, in particular in Belém, where the official memory is staged. Therefore, a “visuality” – that in my perspective was carefully synthesized, updated, (re)defined, and intensified by the fascist dictatorship (1926-1974) – survived the Carnation revolution in 1974 and has very concrete consequences in the lives of many, in particular afrodescendents. Today, this “visuality” permeates common sense, political discourses, the media, museums, and even the scientific literature that proposes to do its critique ends up conveying the same colonial and colonizing use of images. Additionally, a visual illiteracy prevails in all levels of society (which might not be indifferent to the fact that Visual Culture is in such an early stage here). I wonder to what extent the contemporary use of images and discourses of the colonial past isn’t part of the same “visuality complex” that underlied their production in the first place, constituting a way of perpetuating their necessity in the present.

My question to you is thus (and this is not a problem exclusive to Portugal): how to combat the predatory and recycling use of “colonial” materialities and images, in particular by the media, the museum, and, especially, the academy, which persistently racializes subjects and puts them back again into a colonial equation, where it seems they have never left?

The return of the empire, of colonial nostalgia and actually-existing (neo)colonialism is a palpable feature of the present. Throughout The Right to Look, I used the terminology of decoloniality, rather than that of postcolonialism. In short, decoloniality is a longer term project of which the historical experience of post-World War II decolonization was but a significant part. The postcolonial is more specific to the Indian subcontinent than a general or global condition. This theorizing of coloniality and decoloniality comes from the Latin American context, where half a millennium of colonial exploitation has made for caution about declaring that era to be over.

In Europe and the United States, there is also the specific return to colonial form and nostalgia. In Portugal, I’ve been struck by the visible presence of what are still referred to as the “explorers” or the “discoveries,” rather than “colonizers” and “encounter.” (...)

I don’t see this as a symptom of the lack of visual literacy, whatever that means—perhaps it can be more a question of knowledge of visual references? I think it’s about the primacy of “race” as a visualized system of human hierarchy. It is clear that there is no biological or genetic basis for “race,” although different histories can of course be detected and have varying outcomes. (...) Once the police “see” a person as Black or otherwise racialized, the response will be violent. “Police” means not just the uniformed officers on the streets but the entire apparatus of the society of control, noted by Deleuze. But Deleuze did not stress how that society is internally differentiated into the “zones” of self-control offered to those designated “white” and the highly-controlled and differently socialized areas where people may be killed with impunity, not as homo sacer, but as the mark of colonial, racialized hierarchy.

The agenda of decolonization is, then, that of abolition democracy—a democracy in which all people are finally accounted as fully and irrevocably human and on which there is no police.

To read the full interview please visit:

http://www.buala.org/en/face-to-face/theory-is-not-just-words-on-a-page-it-s-also-things-that-are-made-interview-with-nichol

Memory

Excerpt from the text Memory Triptych, 2018

We grow up hearing that those who do not know their history are condemned to repeat it. America, particularly the Latin part of this great continent, has as many memories as fratricidal battles, which everywhere intersect. Conquest, colony, slavery, reconquest, independence and again conquest are part of the history of a land told from the Western viewpoint. The version of those who won the battles is widely known, an account soaked with blood, which systematically ignored what was most important: the beings original to a magical place that does not cease to amaze with its myths, its stories rendered invisible by the fallacy of progress, which knows little or nothing about tradition. To these magical ways of understanding the Earth’s phenomena we must add the African strength that arrived in ships beyond the sea’s blue horizon. Other fears and dreams, other dances and flavors started, over 500 years ago, inhabiting these mountains and valleys. America, the great melting pot of humanity, has black, Indian and white stories which, crisscrossed, are the true Babel tower of the Semite scriptures. Perhaps the Promised Land?

Different ways of being and knowing which, together in a new place, also create new ways of seeing and understanding the universe. Death and its connection are necessarily different in each community. Mexico celebrates its dead at every turn of the sun; Tibetan monks present the dead to the sky, by offering them to the vultures that will raise them high, very high. Other cultures bury the dead, and some burn them.

Two beings, a girl and a boy from the Pacific coast of what is now Peru, members of an ancient pre-Inca culture, the Chancay, dwell mummified in an atypical room of the Carmo Archaeological Museum, in Lisbon. Both are confined in wooden and glass urns, visible by anyone who enters the room, in quite a different position than that culturally given to them by their community, when it prepared them for their journey to eternity. The premises are in fact a library. A sarcophagus and the bust of a Portuguese king are part of the estate next to these two people sadly turned into museum objects.

Nowadays, what culture prevails in the memory of this tragic image? Certainly not the culture of the tree of life, nor the pre-Inca rites which magically merged the sky and the sea to obtain, according to them, a lasting connection of the earthly realm with the mystery of death, of the beyond; it is more exactly the vanity of some cultures who believe it is possible, under precepts of knowledge and power, to symbolically submit others they consider inferior or backwards. The British Museum hosts many of the great treasures of Ancient Egypt, the MET [Metropolitan Museum of Art] has Amerindian collections of inestimable worth, and there are many other examples. Meanwhile, the memory of these two beings is dislocated and lost in a time and space for them so remote as the funerary rites performed in their honor, about half a millennium ago, in a pose that keeps on promising them eternity.

Respectfully re-humanising the museum

I see two Peruvian children, long dead, a Chancay girl and a Chancay boy, who were clearly much loved and mourned in passing, as the respectfully preserved stance shows. They take up little space with knees raised up to their chests and arms clasped around them.

I think of the Chancay culture 40 miles north of present day Lima city, a desert region drying and preserving your small bodies over the centuries, and I wonder about your short lives in the fertile valleys. Did you bathe in the rivers before eating the rich produce of the lands with your families and friends? How did you die?

I feel, as a mother, an unbearable sadness and sense of loss. The death of a child, of a life cut short, is too much to bear and I mourn for you here and now. I try to make points of contact with you and yours. I sense you were deeply mourned so long ago.

Did those who grieved wrap each child in a funerary cloth and put special mementoes with each of them, in a separate pot perhaps. Where are your beautiful woven clothes? What colours were the threads dyed - reds, yellows, browns, blues, greens and white to brighten your passing? Did the weaver use llama wool and intricately form designs of anthropomorphic feline figures to accompany you in death? Your ‘grave goods’, not personal belongings, but ‘commodities’ sit in the museum as you sit yourselves, commodified. How were you separated from the textile love tokens that eased the loss of your passing for those who survived as they bade you farewell with such respect? Were you stolen, brought, exchanged as merchandise in colonial times?

Now you are imprisoned, encased behind glass far from home, as no deceased human should be. No ancestors claim you. There is no outcry and clamour for your return home. But. Are we not obliged to respect you as fellow humans? How does your demeaning display impact on our very personhood?

Here you are so dehumanized, as we are, who stand and stare. What to do? How to act? Can we not restore some of your humanity and reclaim the human in us all?

Can we not transform the museum temple where you are imprisoned into a museum forum, a ‘home-place’, for you and where all are welcomed and respected? Professor Joan Anim-Addo and I have some success with creative writing work making the Horniman Museum in London an inclusive site for critical thinking and activism for social change (Golding 2016). Knowing some human beings, too often those with black and brown skins, have been and are still treated abominably, we worked to make visible the shameful histories of the transatlantic slave trade that are ‘difficult’ for museums and mostly hidden. In the Horniman homeplace the creative voices of people from African Caribbean communities who were historically subjected to domination and oppression were raised and their stories of resistance brought to life countering the simplistic ‘Othering’ of those ancestors. Thus we made the museum ours, a homeplace, a caring space.

Across the ocean in the museum where you are on show the care and concern of one human for another fellow is absent, as it is in much of the wider world outside its walls. Let me imagine how I can cherish you from afar. Let me cover your naked body. Let me also offer clothing to those who live today in straitened circumstances. If you were more respectfully treated in our museum home-place might you not inspire simple acts of mercy amongst those of us who are fortunate, to share what we have for the common good, rather than grasping for more and more until our coffers overflow while ‘Others’ have little?

With respect you can help us build a new museum practice, inspired by radical theorists such as Paulo Freire, where dialogue or conversation lies at the heart. This would not be idle chitter chatter but respectful work, demanding an open attitude from museums to engage diverse audiences in an active to and fro conversational process, throughout our lives. It would not demand museums relinquish all their authority and control but enable them to think more creatively and to collaborate widely with creative people around the world, specifically with Peruvian people in this case. My experience in the museum field, over some four decades, shows that when we learn to really listen, taken-for-granted ideas can be exposed, stereotype and prejudice challenged and attitudes positively changed.

As I note elsewhere, museums working in isolation cannot change the world but perhaps working together with creative people they can progress citizenship, taking responsability, in a shared social experience, not for your history and mine but ours. Might such collaborative creative work not begin to transform our globe? (Golding 2017: 1008)

For me then you point to the urgent need for museums to develop pedagogy of care, pedagogy of love, pedagogy of hope. Onwards!

References

Golding, Viv, 2017, 'Developing Pedagogies of Human Rights and Social Justice in the Prison Museum' in Wilson J. Hodgkinson, S. Piché J. and Walby, K. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism, Palgrave Macmillan, London: 987-1008.

Golding, Viv, 2016, Learning at the Museum Frontiers: Identity, Race and Power, Routledge, London.

Human remains on display: a museum perspective

The de-colonial agenda programme among other things explores the contentious legacy of collections of human skulls, assembled during the 19th and early 20th centuries and still held in public institutions in Europe. Some skulls were taken close to home within the broader context of the affirmation of empire and universal power which saw to the displacement of heritage and human remains within Europe. Italy, Greece and Turkey have such histories of cultural plunder of communities, leading to the displacement of heritage as well as humans, dead or alive by the other stronger empires such as the French, the British. This attests to the presence of the parthenon marbles within the British Museum. Also, around 1800, the Musée Napoléon in Paris amassed heritage from Italy, Germany, Poland, Belgium and the Netherlands. Other human remains in European museums were looted from the graves of indigenous peoples across the globe, taken without consent and in violation of local beliefs. The questions often asked today are: who has the right to keep the bones of others as an artistic or scientific spectacle? to keep other people’s dead remains in museums against the knowledge, acknowledgement of their descendants? Were they bought, plundered, an offer and a part of a common practice of “investment” as seen in the 19^th century? Were they auctioned, as some sort of currency exchange, or donated to museums such as those found at the Carmo museum in Lisbon? Are they objectified as collections and what does this display say to their ancestral and cultural beliefs? Should museums alone determine their fate as a touristic attraction to be gazed at, photographed and subject to having their image circulated worldwide online (e.g. on Instragam or Facebook)?

We explore these critical questions through the many different approaches currently implored such as, public talks, the media, exhibitions, public performances, video installations in which people share their thoughts and feelings about this display of human remains. Besides the public, it would also be interesting to invite communities of provenance/the indigenous people/the descendants from which the human remains come to share their opinion, to voice and to reflect upon the ethics of those displays. This move would reflect on the role that they think they should play besides that of the curators, scientists, artists and the general public towards rethinking an appropriate place and purpose for these remains. Many museums and countries have so far started to engage in the same way, i.e. the Canadians and the First Nations, the Iziko Museums of South Africa and the Khoi-San people etc. However, in the absence of such, we often get the many bitter reactions such as that of the Nama/Herero people of Namibia, who have now engaged in a lawsuit against the German government towards the presence of their ancestral skulls in German museums and other institutions. As would be expected, in the lawsuit they now demand damages resulting from the genocide. According to them, the Nama and Herero are entitled to the return of all body parts, an accounting of scientific research revenues plus interest, an accounting of all medical discoveries, academic findings, and scientific conclusions drawn from the research and experiments.

According to a write up on the Dead Images Conference and Exhibition planned by the Edinburgh College of Art in June 2018, collections of human remains are a challenging heritage. There is therefore, a need for diverse reflections on encounters to these collections, to critically explore the histories, including histories of violence and dispossession, which are disclosed in these diasporic gatherings of bones and the problem of their current display in public spaces. The painful reality is that, while there are historical explanations for that, there are no valid justifications that are durable and unconditional for the none reversal of this historical mishap. Human remains as indicated by the French foreign minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault in 2016, are some of the “inalienable” museum possessions that should never really have left their ancestral lands. On the other hand, the mood today from both the Global North and the Global South is that a move towards the repatriation of such will be welcomed by many museums and curators.

This is the background that speaks to the current exhibition of the dead bodies of the two young Amerindians in display cases which as should be expected, violently offends the dignity of the deceased and perpetuates the hierarchies of power that allow for the bodies to be a continent away from their original burial site. It is therefore rather disturbing that to the Carmo Archaeological Museum the exhibition of the bodies, as if they were objects, is not deemed disturbing, and still seems to fit well into the historical narrative that has worked to make such an order seem natural. It is also disturbing that at this juncture of the global outcry towards de-colonial approaches, the Carmo Museum could still ignore the need for a critical reassessment of the museum’s role and the responsibility towards this issue of global concern.

As a way of conclusion, it would be well to observe that while ICOM and UNESCO have opted for the less confrontational option of a shared, universal heritage as opposed to the demands for restitution and return, some museums and curators still make observations such as the one below:

African Looted Heritage is not a “shared heritage”

Some foreign countries present the argument justifying their continued holding of African Looted Cultural Properties: We have a “shared global heritage”. It’s ok, if you pretend you don’t run after financial benefits from those collections, you can make copies of them and give us back the original ones.

African women and men have the right to recover this ancestral cultural heritage which is a very important part of their being.

Ech Cherki Dahmali

References

Nama/Herero Lawsuit against Germany by Sima-Luipert Goeieman, presented at a Panel Discussion for the Nama Cultural Festival in Keetmanshoop on 26^th May, 2018.

What Restitution Experts Have to Say About President Macron’s Pledge to Return Artefacts by Gareth Harris, 29 November, 2017.

African Looted Heritage is not a ‘Shared Heritage’ a statement by Ech Cherki Dahmali (AFRICOM President).

Abstracts on the June/August Dead Images Exhibition and Conference by the Edinburgh College of Art, June-July, 2018.

Dead Bodies on Display: El Negro in Cross Cultural Perspective, by Bruce Bennett, Pula: Botswana Journal of African Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1, (University of Botswana 2002).

The Leibnitz Project Cluster, ‘Translocations’ by Benedicte Savoy, (Technische Universität Berlin, 2016).

We Decolonize Our Museums, ‘Dissonance’ by Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko, (TDDxDirigo, 2016).