In recent years, we have witnessed something that seemed unthinkable a generation ago: objects returning. In 2021, France returned twenty-six works from the royal treasury of Abomey to Benin, taken as loot in 1892. In 2022, Germany signed the transfer to Nigeria of the one thousand one hundred and thirty Benin Bronzes identified in its public museums, and the first pieces were flown to Abuja in December of that year. The Parthenon Marbles remain in London, but even there, where a 1963 law prevents the British Museum from disposing of its holdings, there is already talk of loans and partnerships that twenty years ago no one would have formulated aloud.
Whether these objects should be returned is a subject of intense political and moral debate. That is not the discussion I wish to initiate here. I am interested in a prior, more quiet question, which the act of restitution exposes and which almost no one formulates: what, exactly, is it that returns. For we take it for granted that the object returning is the same one that was taken, and I am not certain that it is.
A Benin bronze was cast for a royal altar, to fulfil a function within a court and a cult. For over a century in a European display case, it was not that: it was an ethnographic piece, then a masterpiece of African art, then a symbol of plunder and debt. When it returns to Nigeria, it does not return to being what it was. The court for which it was made no longer exists in the form that necessitated it; the world that gave it meaning is not waiting for it intact on the other side of the journey. It returns, but it returns to a different place, and above all, it returns as something else: it is now also the object that was away and has returned. That history—of having been torn away and restored—has adhered to it, and can no longer be removed.
Esto no es un argumento contra la restitución, sino lo contrario: notar que la pregunta «¿es el mismo objeto?» no tiene una respuesta física. Materialmente, sí, es el mismo bronce, los mismos átomos que salieron de Benín. Pero un objeto cultural no es solo su materia; como un cuadro no es solo su tela, es la materia más la red de sentido que lo sostiene: para qué se hizo, quién lo reconoce, qué historia arrastra, en qué relato se inscribe. Y esa red ha cambiado por completo. El objeto que vuelve carga con todo lo que le pasó mientras estaba fuera, y eso lo ha transformado sin tocar un solo gramo de su materia.
Hay un argumento clásico que se apoya justo en esta ambigüedad para defender que los objetos se queden donde están. Lo formularon dieciocho grandes museos del mundo en 2002, en una declaración sobre «la importancia y el valor de los museos universales»: las grandes colecciones —dicen— sirven no a los ciudadanos de una nación, sino a los de todas; un objeto en el Louvre o en el British Museum pertenece a un patrimonio de la humanidad y desde ahí es accesible a cualquiera. El objeto, en esta lógica, ya no es de Benín ni de Grecia: es del mundo, y el museo enciclopédico es su casa legítima. Es un argumento serio, también interesante, y las dos cosas a la vez. Serio porque es verdad que el objeto, al circular, se cargó de sentidos que no tenía en su altar de origen. Interesante porque quien lo esgrime es, casualmente, quien tiene el objeto.
Pero fíjense en lo que ese argumento concede sin querer, y ahí está mi punto: admite que el objeto ya no es el que era. Que su paso por el mundo lo transformó, que hoy significa cosas que no significaba, que es «de la humanidad» precisamente porque dejó de ser solo lo que fue. Los partidarios de retener y los partidarios de devolver coinciden, sin darse cuenta, en una misma premisa: que el objeto cambió. Discrepan sobre qué hacer con ese cambio, no sobre si ocurrió.
And it is here that restitution conveys something that transcends the logistics of moving crates. Returning an object is not rewinding history to the period before the looting, as if the intervening time had not existed. That is impossible: the century in the display case occurred, and it occurred in reality. Restitution is something else, more difficult and more honest: it is the recognition that the object now possesses a longer and more wounded biography, which includes the displacement and the return, and the decision that this biography should continue in the place from which it originated rather than in the place that took it. One does not restore a previous state. One chooses where the history of the object shall continue to unfold from this point forward.
This is why what returns is never what departed. Nothing passes, because what remained is also not what it was. No object traverses a century of history without history traversing it. What restitution brings to the table, beyond justice or reparation, is a truth about objects that we tend to forget before any work in any gallery: that they are not static things with a fixed identity, but knots of meaning that time never ceases to re-tie. An object is, also, everything that has happened to it. And sometimes what has happened to it is having left and having returned.
On the open conversation
This text continues my interest in the ontology of the artistic object: what a work is beyond its materiality, and how time and circulation transform it without physical contact. Restitution serves here as a limiting case for a broader inquiry into the identity of the work. I have deliberately avoided taking a position in the political debate surrounding each specific dispute. Should anyone wish to contribute from the perspectives of museology, heritage law, post-colonial studies, or the philosophy of art, this notebook remains open.
Sources
Sarr, Felwine and Bénédicte Savoy. Rapport sur la restitution du patrimoine culturel africain. Vers une nouvelle éthique relationnelle. Ministry of Culture, France, November 2018.
Federal Foreign Office of Germany. Joint Declaration on the Return of Benin Bronzes and Bilateral Museum Cooperation, 1 July 2022.
Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac. “Restitution de 26 œuvres à la République du Bénin”, 2021.
British Museum Act 1963, section 5 (legislation.gov.uk); House of Lords Library, “Elgin Marbles: UK government assessment of loaning the sculptures to Greece”, 11 December 2023.
“Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums” (2002).
Cuno, James. “Culture War: The Case Against Repatriating Museum Artifacts”. Foreign Affairs 93(6), 2014.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Whose Culture Is It, Anyway?”, in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, 2006.