2024-04-29 10:45:39
French museums are conducting verification of the origins of about 90,000 African artifacts, believed to have been looted during colonial rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the aim of returning them to their original homes on the African continent.
According to Monte Carlo International, most of these pieces (about 79 thousand of them) are located in the corridors and galleries of the Quay Branly Museum in Paris, which is dedicated to the art of indigenous peoples in Africa, Asia, Oceania and America, while the Angoulême Museum includes about 5 thousand African artifacts, and museums in France contain In total, there are tens of thousands of African works of art.
Determining the source of the artifact is an essential task in the relevant French museums. It requires an effort to track down the necessary information, and it also takes a long time. The relative lack of sources is considered one of the most prominent problems facing the museum administration in its work.
The French Army Museum began inventories in 2012, but it was only able to study a quarter of the 2,248 African pieces, hinting at the existence of a “logical hypothesis” that a large number of the pieces represent spoils of war.
Emily Giraud, president of Ecome France, which oversees 600 museums, believes that investigative work requires verifying evidence and finding sources that may be scattered…or may not exist in the first place.
The criteria that determine the necessity of returning antiquities to their places remain ambiguous, and it is expected that research related to the source of antiquities will become easier after this type of research becomes widespread.
In this context, the University of Paris-Nanterre offered a training course dedicated to the subject of the origins of artifacts in 2022, followed by the Louvre School in the heart of the famous museum in 2023.
Last January, Germany and France launched a three-year fund worth 2.1 million euros dedicated to research related to the source of the antiquities.
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2024-04-29 10:45:39