It is no secret that millions of objects never intended for museum display have been looted from all over the world by different imperial powers. It is no secret that many of them have been carefully preserved in pristine museums and are now seen as precious art objects. At the same time, it is no secret that millions of people robbed of tools, masks, and other objects that constituted their world continue to see. a place where they can rebuild their homes. Not only do they have rights to these objects, their rights are inscribed in them.
Imagine these were the people calling for help. Alternately, imagine that these figures had not been robbed of the people who made them. Imagine that they could fulfill their function and protect those people who today are called undocumented.
Robbing these figures required much violence, deception, and manipulation. The techniques of robbing differed, but many of these Imperial actors took advantage of a certain kind of kindness for a lack of a better term on the part of the natives, as well as their fellows in Europe. Still today, even though many have some knowledge about the scope of imperialism, violence, they tend to be shocked whenever they learn about another type of monstrous atrocity.
Such types make up the banality of imperialism. And when people argue then and now that they ought not to have happened, they express a naive refusal to accept the normalcy of this Even the objects themselves are not completely settled down. Look at them, and you will see signs of boredom, exhaustion, pain, rage, longing, and disorientation after decades of being kept in places where they do not belong. Bereft of the people among whom they used to exist.
Artifacts preserved in European museums. are not just exemplary masterpieces. They are also congealed forms of imperial violence!
Centuries of imperialism have taught armed imperial actors that they have a license to shoot those who reach their borders, carrying only small bundles with them, only enough to provide for their immediate needs. The objects that belong to these people's communities had already entered the borders of imperial states. Yes, B.
befall when they were transported by force through imperial expeditions. It is therefore time to refuse the undocumented status imperial states have forced on these people who feel they have no choice but to migrate to the same states and claim their due rights. Their movement is a reparative one, and we are being called to endorse it. If Africans leave Africa, they leave in boats to come here. It's due to Europeans, to African wealth.
Here in Europe, there was nothing. Everything we see here, there was nothing. We took them from Africa. We took our treasures, we took our things to bring them here.
If someone takes something from you, and even takes your resources, you have nothing to live for. If you're hungry, you have to go see him. It's true.
They may not have the documents required at the border, but they have well-documented objects in all these museums. This is why they are reaching out. Their movement is a counter expedition.
A counter expedition of people refusing to be separated from the world they see as their own. They are expected by these objects. Some of these protective figures still struggle to preserve their protective powers, following them from afar. To see their movement as reparative, we must first recognize the violence of separating objects and people into two separate regimes.
A regime in which objects are well documented and cared for by museum experts. Another regime in which people are declared undocumented and subjected to border police protocols. These people are not threatening the sovereign country.
countries in which they seek asylum, they are threatening the prerogative of colonial actors who created a system in which they enjoy similar conditions of movements as do those objects that that they looted from others. They made these objects theirs in order to render others objectless and to limit or completely block their movement. Those who reach the border refuse to recognize this dubious ownership of their objects and the rights on which such ownership is predicated.
They are key actors. actors in a political reality that they aspire to generate. In this transformed potential world of which they are carriers, the borders and legal systems that were conceived to keep people and objects separated will be abolished.
From the moment of initial dispossession onward, the people from whom these objects were expropriated have known that the restitution of such objects is long overdue. It is these people's ongoing refusal to recognize imperial ownership of their objects that has made the discussion of restitution possible. You know what I'm saying here? Because when you look at the picture from this perspective, you see admiration and beauty.
When you go closer, you see harm that was done to people. Because now you see cultures, you don't have all the fancy lights around. But you start looking at the details, you see the reality.
The right to live where one's culture is preserved is inalienable. It can be defended on the basis of museums' looted objects. You cast these heads with their eyes shut, hoping that if you couldn't see their eyes, they wouldn't see you, either.
Be assured, they have not missed a tiny bit of your cruelty. This is a common imperial stupidity, denying your victims the conditions to respond and acting as if they were in your hands agreeing to be drained of their worlds. Their resentment is a solid substance that cannot be melted down or prevented from being transmitted.
As you dared to measure people's skulls and cast their spirits as exotic items in your imaginary galleries, you also aimed to engineer us, citizens, to forge us as perfect museum-goers, oblivious to the blood and toil spent to build your enlightened shrines. You expected us to forever view your plunder through the lens you forced on us, as if we were machines you have the right to program. It's true.
It worked for a certain while. We cannot deny that we were taken by the world offered to us by museums. Did we stay here because we accepted the normalization of your violence?
No. Not at all. Maybe we knew that the intimacy we felt when we entered these spaces could be turned into an antidote for their poisonous origins. As if we were responding to implants. Our bodies will resist your violence and your apparatuses, even if it takes time.
We are here now to rewind history. Don't you dare believe that we will embrace your model of restitution, which you present as a gift. This is just another form of imperial exchange, where the takers generously give back what never belonged to them.
We endorse the restitution of what was naturalized as museums' wealth only in regard to specific objects claimed by communities who were deprived of them. Beyond that, we imagine a more substantial mode of reparations, one that would undo the imperial separation of people and objects. We are here to join others in their just struggle to reverse each and every foundation of the world you built with stolen objects, stolen labor, and stolen lives.
We are not asking to be integrated into your world of respectability or to be included among your elite perpetrators. It is not about naming now the people who were forced to represent types. Anyhow, we don't forget the crimes of your collectors whom you qualify prominent.
Your museum founders or anthropologists. whose work you praise as groundbreaking. We are not interested in your reparative measures that preserve the same imperial premises. To begin with, we are not interested in being part of your family of man. Presenting the family of man with a new diverse cast of peoples is a colonial gesture of inclusion, one that falls short of repair or reparations.
Not willing to undo the imperial system, inheritors of colonial worldviews, who still occupy key positions in which they are responsible for representing their ancestors' crimes, are today extending their notion of humanity to encompass those whom their ancestors deprived of their worlds. But for those who had different cosmologies, this notion of humanity was always dubious. This notion of the family of man was made possible only by the people of the world. Only because you plundered samples and specimens from every corner of the earth and made them components of your narratives.
To expect us to enter into a conversation with you, you first have to disown what you plundered. We have become the constituents of museums and archives and as their constituents we demand the disowning of looted objects. Disowning is a first step in the liberation of these objects from the imperial yoke, a move toward making them available to others to whom they belong, either in their own countries or in the countries where the objects were carefully preserved to make sure their claimants wouldn't have access to them.
Disowning should be unconditional. The future of these objects must be determined only by their rightful claimants. Why do you think the arm of this figure was cut?
To prevent you from appropriating its secrets like you appropriated everything else. Why do you think these people who inherited their ancestors' art-making skills need experts in art to teach them how to make art? They do need reparations for the damage caused to the infrastructures that render art-making possible.
You can teach them to sculpt figures with their arms intact, but they will still refrain from divulging their secrets. Aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, aya, a These objects should have stayed on top of the baskets in which they kept their relatives' bones. By denuding queens and kings of their regalia and showing it in museums, you are able to claim that your democracies are the only legitimate form of power.
First, art experts in Berlin or Paris in New York or Vienna, denuded these objects of everything that they considered to be superfluous, to their pure forms. Today, they are enlivening these objects by placing them next to photos of the people who inherited their meaning, recreating colorful scenes of communal life in the museum. These are not reparative measures.
Nor are they a form of decolonization. These woods are not resources. They never have been. Shaping them in the form of books does not make your extraction more acceptable. Ayah Ayah Ayah Ayah Ayah Ayah Where are the carved tusks or other objects of which these were parts?
Your obsession with serial numbers cannot erase the violence. Fragmenting these objects and selling the parts to different European capitals were helpful measures to solidify a circle of experts that would affirm that your violence was really scholarship. From the enterprise of encyclopedic museums whose aim is to collect objects from every tiny community in the world, Palestine simply disappeared, as if there were no Palestinian objects, as if Palestine were not part of Asia. No matter how you turn the map, Palestine is not there.
On the geographical map, however, the name of Israel replaces Palestine. But museums of primitive arts do not own objects from imperial states like Israel. This is their way of drawing the line between imperial states and communities doomed to vanish.
One day, samples from this imperial state and others like it will be collected and displayed in museums of bygone imperial times. Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, Aya, A You see it if you want to see it. But the idea was to start the exhibition with a statement, so the statement that the museum distances itself from the colonial past. If you show that kind of status immediately, obviously the visitor could interpret it in the reverse way. And that's one of the major challenges like in the Rotunda as well.
I mean you can put as many texts as you want but the first impression that visitors will have is visual So it's almost impossible to introduce use visitors to those old colonial statues with the message that we actually want to distance ourselves from them. And that's the reason why it was decided to stop. I would start with the blow-up of that painting by Sheri Samba, because the message that it conveys is a message that is shared by many, if not the majority of Congolese, that the statue of the Leopard Man is offensive.
The visitor who has seen that blow-up, he then has the choice whether to enter the depot or simply visit the rest of the exhibition. not enough for justice to be done, it must be seen to be done, so it's something that you have to do in public. The idea was we want to bury them, but we want to bury them publicly, rather than simply putting them in the reserves where no one can see them. A map is like a census. It is used against people not in their favor.
The use of maps by museums is one of the most telling signs that they are institutions of empire. citizens of imperial states continue to consume maps as education, not asking why their own countries give them access to other people's treasures and why people with connections to these treasures are endangered at the US and Europe's borders. These citizens actually reaffirmed their historical alliance with empire. A few European citizens reject the imperial command and dare to assist refugees who smuggle the borders.
The penalties imposed by imperial states are designed to make such acts of refusal even less magical. When Spain made the expeditions to Guinea-Cartorial, the Germans, the French and the English, they visited during the 19th century. It was his expedition much later than the majority of colonial countries. They are from Morocco and also from the Royal Cote of Guinea. There are also expeditions to America.
For the museum's histography, it is quite useful that the term expedition is distinguished from war booty or simply plunder. In this way, whatever Spain took from the very first voyage of Columbus and onward is not counted. Not that it matters so much what museums call it, as museums do not hesitate to report the details of their expeditions and even take pride in them.
They often display their efforts under the sign of the Museum of the World. of achievements. Sometimes plunder is described as gift. The museum counts on us to acknowledge that it is natural that these objects are here. Imagine a palace in the desert without a facade.
The facade taken from the Masada Palace in today's Jordan stands on its own in Berlin. The museum describes it as the largest example of Islamic art in any museum. The museum counts it as a success if you imagine that you are walking in the processional way through Babylon's Ishar Gate without asking why. But why are we being asked to imagine that we are elsewhere?
What is this weird idea of imaginary dislocation? Especially strange because it is not in fact imaginary, but a real dislocation brick by brick. A plundered recreation of others' world that might invite us to disembowel the real condition of where we are so that we can imagine being elsewhere. The museum seeks to provide visitors with a comprehensive story about the objects on display, one that provides context and offers the feeling of being part of the research.
This story often includes incriminating details about the act of collecting, but these are not presented as such. The museum pretends to ask difficult questions. Nearby the prayer niche from Konya, modern-day Turkey, the text reads, Did historians have the right to remove pieces from their original places? And the reply follows, In the early 20th century, many pieces were broken off and sold in many places. Berlin experts collected about 65% of the individual pieces and reconstructed the niche in Berlin.
In Turkey, people think differently and ask according to what logic a 13th century prayer niche from central Anatolia is being displayed in Berlin. A prayer niche is not just an archaeological object. Turkish authorities even contest the right of a sultan to give such a thing as a gift. People who work in museums, they have this kind of fetishism for the collection. I mean it's almost as if they want to protect the objects from the public, but what's the point?
This wealth of objects was made inaccessible to the people who created them. and to the communities in which they had been produced and used for many purposes other than contemplation. The breach between colonized people and their objects and resources which Euro-American museums hold is one of the founding principles of imperialism which has not yet been abolished and is still not conceived as an open debt that Europe owes to colonized peoples. The collections in public museums such as ours are inalienable, so we're not supposed to actually restitute them.
When you're confronted with the fact that 80 to 90% of Africa's cultural heritage is kept outside the continent, how can you not be in favour of restitution? It just doesn't make any sense. The restitution of objects, the hiring of refugees as guides to work in museums that hold artifacts plundered from their homelands, and the creation of digital archives of destroyed cities could be the biggest challenges for the future generations. beginning of reparations. Or they could be nothing more than the continuation of imperial institutions benefiting from other people's cheap labor, resources, and memories.
Do you remember? Dayohana and Usman Sabin's film Black Girl. When formerly colonized people knock on your doors, they are offering you a gift, the gift of awakening from your colonial crimes. When Daohana was maltreated, she took this gift back.
With her, we learn that a gift is irreducible to the object, for it is not unconditionally given. Imperial crimes are materialized in your institutions, professions, and communities. and gestures. The gift offered to you is a way out of the position that compels you to act as a guardian of these crimes. When you don't recognize this gift, you see yourself as the one who is required to give.
Even worse, you attack when the gift is taken back. Remember that the rights of those people you condemn as undocumented are inscribed and the objects that you hold against them. Even our bodies are in a location. Our bodies are in a location. There are no borders.
There are no borders on Earth. When you are inside, there are no borders. You are French, you will stay on the other side of the Earth.
You are Senegalese, you will stay here. When we die, we are all in the same hole.