The purpose of museums as we know them is to collect, preserve, and exhibit cultural material. Still, a conspicuous number of objects that are now on display in Western ethnographic museums were once razed by European colonizers, justifying the act as an attempt to better preserve those cultural artifacts.
Nowadays, museums face repatriation cases on a daily basis, as a more vivid conscience on violent histories has developed among their venues. Many items, though, are still being kept by European institutions, despite several formal requests accumulating.
Oxford Professor Dan Hicks, Curator at the Pitt River Museum, focuses his investigation on the Benin Bronzes case: during the 1897 punitive -and astonishingly brutal- British expedition, these artifacts were savagely stolen and brought to Britain.
Starting from narrating the omitted history of the 10.000 Benin Bronzes -still scattered globally in museums’ collections- the reflection draws from the presence and significance of colonial violence amongst European institutions.
Benin Bronzes, The British Museum Hicks straightforwardly addresses the inertness of the British Museum in restitution campaigns, arguing that museums cannot promote for acknowledgment of their colonial pasts while clinging to the objects they still have hold. “When projects and institutions proclaim a commitment to ‘diversity and ‘inclusion’, we need to attend to these claims with a critical eye” states Hicks. The presence of the Benin Bronzes in our museums, as for many other objects, is equivalent to perpetuating offense against the people these items were once stolen from.
“Britain has reached a crucial juncture in how to understand its imperial past,” writes Hicks, and restitution, in all circumstances, seems to be the only path European institutions can take. Hopefully, this will lead to a new direction in which museums could be experienced as a site of dialogue and openness: “from the museum as an end-point to the museum as a process”, Hicks affirms.
A powerful, complex reading of a compelling case that every museum professional should carefully reflect on.
Written by Sofia Sireno
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