In “Relooted” players find themselves in a major museum, busting through walls, arms full of ill-begotten African artifacts to be returned to their rightful homes. The game features a crew of Robin Hood-esque thieves staging elaborate heists to take back stolen artifacts from Western museums, and repatriating them to the peoples from whom they were taken.
As part of donation agreements with private collectors, such museums could agree to make the objects the focus of courses centred on provenance research and related issues. A key goal of the research would be to trace as complete an ownership history as possible and identify the most likely country of origin for all the objects.
In a lengthy and worthwhile essay in ARTnews about the progress in the restitution discourse, both steps forward and steps back in the former colonizers’ countries and the former colonies are discussed.
