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

It is with pleasure that we announce our Pressing Matter final conference: Rethinking the Restitutionary Moment: What Next?

When?

Thursday 27 November to Friday 28 November at the Wereldmuseum Leiden. The two-day conference is preceded by the Brainwash Special event with Achile Mbembe at the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam on Wednesday 26 November from 19:00 to 22:00

Event description and programme:

The multi-year research project Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums draws to a close at the end of 2025. Pressing Matter, funded by the Dutch Science Agenda (NWA-NWO) and the consortium partners, investigated the future of objects collected in colonial times. It asked about the potentialities of ‘colonial objects’ to support societal reconciliation with the colonial past and its afterlives, and how best to deal with conflicting claims by different stakeholders for these objects. This final conference explores what Pressing Matter’s critical friend, Professor Ciraj Rassool, has described as the restitutionary moment we now inhabit. What are its challenges and opportunities?

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 objects collected during the colonial period and now in European Museums. Each presenter is asked to respond to the question what now, what next. These 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. Indeed, 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 and made at 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?

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

• How are the discussions on restitution happening in social settings outside 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 – help a critical understanding of the impact of colonialism in different contexts?

• What might art do to reinterpret colonial collections and help societies address the troubles present of the past?

• 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, the spirits seriously as European museums come to terms with these histories of alienation?

• What role can museums and universities play in shaping discussions and heritage practices around contemporary law and notions of ownership that do not reproduce colonial logics? Does it make sense to think in terms of repair?

• How can European governments do restitution to countries of origin without resuscitating colonial modes of relating?

The two-day conference is preceded by the Brainwash Special event with Achile Mbembe at the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam (see the programme below).

Registration links:

Registration for the two-day Pressing Matter Final Conference is via this link

Link to book the ticket for the Brainwash Special event with Achile Mbembe is via this link

Contact:

Karina Rinaldi-Doligez-Spruijtenburg, Project Coordinator of Pressing Matter, k.e.rinaldidoligez@vu.nl