The 'Oceania and Indonesia' holdings in Altenburg (approx. 350 objects) and the entire ethnographic collection (approx. 250 objects) in Meerane will be examined. The initial check follows a research project on the Africa collection in Altenburg and the recommendation by ethnologist Ms Dolz from the State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony for Meerane.
The main objective of this project is to create an interdisciplinary network of researchers working on the history of ancestral remains collections in museums in Germany and France from Central and Southern Africa, with a particular focus on provenance research.
Disrupting and Reorienting Restitution (DRR) invites applications from Egyptian and Mozambican multidisciplinary artists to take part in a focused, practice-based artistic collaboration engaging with contested African collections held in European museums.
The Dutch NWO will fund eight research projects “Research into collections with a colonial context”. The programme aims to redress injustices and strengthen trust and cooperation with the countries of origin.
A £1.1million Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) standard grant has been awarded to an international team of scholars, archivists and filmmakers for a project on African film heritage restitution.
[ in English and in German ] The main focus is on cultural belongings from four Cameroonian communities, the Bakoko, Bamum, Duala, and Maka, whose heritage was absorbed by these institutions during the German colonial era (1884-1919). This should also become a basis for future restitutions.
This project explores the colonial framework that has shaped our understanding and knowledge of historical objects, focusing on the Lombok Treasures looted from Cakranegara Palace in 1894. Adopting a decolonial perspective, this project reframes these heritage objects as living entities endowed with knowledge and cultural significance, rather than mere relics.
Timor-Leste has a long and complex history of colonial entanglements with the Portuguese, and the number of Portuguese documents related to this is rather big. Their digitalisation will help on both sides.
[ in German ] The Roman-Catholic (RC) Institute for World-Church and Mission (IWM) in Frankfurt am Main is running a two-years pilot-project "Mission-History Collections", funded by two RC organisations.
By looking into museum inventories and archives, The Restitution of Knowledge wishes to document and rethink the history of ‘plunder’ in ethnological collections.
