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.
This is not an argument against restitution, but the opposite: to note that the question 'is it the same object?' has no physical answer. Materially, yes, it is the same bronze, the same atoms that left Benin. But a cultural object is not merely its matter; just as a painting is not merely its canvas, it is the matter plus the network of meaning that sustains it: why it was made, who recognises it, what history it carries, in what narrative it is inscribed. And that network has changed entirely. The object that returns carries everything that happened to it while it was away, and that has transformed it without altering a single gram of its matter.
There is a classic argument that relies precisely on this ambiguity to defend the objects remaining where they are. It was formulated by eighteen of the world's major museums in 2002, in a declaration on 'the importance and value of universal museums': the great collections—they state—serve not the citizens of one nation, but those of all; an object in the Louvre or the British Museum belongs to a heritage of humanity and from there is accessible to anyone. The object, in this logic, no longer belongs to Benin or to Greece: it belongs to the world, and the encyclopaedic museum is its legitimate home. It is a serious argument, and also an interesting one, and both at once. Serious because it is true that the object, by circulating, became charged with meanings it did not possess on its original altar. Interesting because the one who wields it is, coincidentally, the one who possesses the object.
However, observe what that argument inadvertently concedes, and therein lies my point: it admits that the object is no longer what it was. That its passage through the world transformed it, that today it signifies things it did not signify before, that it is 'of humanity' precisely because it ceased to be only what it once was. Proponents of retention and proponents of restitution coincide, without realising it, on the same premise: that the object changed. They disagree on what to do with that change, not on whether it occurred.
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.
An 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.