 Yep, excellent. Babe, good morning. Next session will be in English. So if you need interpretation, you can pick up on translation device. It would be interpreted into Spanish. So it is my pleasure to introduce to all of you, Professor Dan Hicks. He's a professor of contemporary archaeology at the University of Oxford. He's also a fellow of St. Cross College at Oxford. And also, Professor Hicks is a creator at the Peat Rivers Museum, which according to its website, the museum displays archaeological and demographic materials from all parts of the world. Professor Hicks has published eight different books and numerous articles on the topic of colonial heritage. Last year in 2020, he published the book that has been already mentioned, the British museums, the Benin bronzes, colonial violence and cultural restitution, a book that has had a big impact on the debate on restitution. I guess that the book can be understood, you can correct me, as a manifesto to turn museums inside of conscience with a simple message, return all that was taken during colonial times. More or less, this could be the message of the book. And so again, we are very pleased to have Professor Hicks for delivering the opening lecture of today's conference. His presentation today is also entitled The British Museum as the book. So, then the floor is yours and afterwards we will have some time for questions. Wonderful. Okay. Many thanks. It's wonderful to be here and absolutely wonderful also to be not on zoom. And so we have to do the tech and we can't remember how to use the PowerPoint and so on. It's absolutely wonderful to be here in person. So I'm going to talk I think for about half an hour or so, because I think it's important that we also open this up for conversation and I think in the writing of the book, one thing I didn't ever, I guess I hoped for but I didn't expect was how it lands in a very different different locations around the world in Africa in North America and of course, importantly, this is a European conversation, you know, as well. So I think in order just to nuance what was said in the introduction, I think the book is about giving back when asked. It isn't about emptying out our museums. It isn't an attack upon museums in a lot of ways. It's a book which is based on my experience over the past 15 years. As curator here at the Pit Rivers, for those of you who can't imagine the Pit Rivers, here it is. And it was founded in 1884. It is a university museum. It's one of the four of the museums of the University of Oxford. And in many ways I guess the book started and I wanted this talk really to start with that observation that those of us who work in a museum context, those who are who are curators have a have a role which in many ways is about seeking to keep things the same. And we have to make sure that the iron work isn't eaten away by rust and that the textiles aren't eaten away by moths. Sometimes we've experienced a sort of a mission, a mission creep, whereby we have have imagined that our role is also to stop the world around us from changing. Here at the Pit Rivers, you know, actually, the world around us has changed. And that means that we have to listen to voices outside of our own authority outside of the usual model of us being the experts. We see curation as co-curation. We have to start to think about a museum space where we care more for people than we do for things. So the first point in order just to finish the first point, you know, here is the position from which this book was written and I think to state my positionality and my privilege, you know, which of course as a curator in this context is my role as my maleness, my whiteness, my role as an elite institution, my access to knowledge about objects is maybe also a massive sort of part of the privilege. But too often, we think that simply to state the privilege is enough. To say here's where I'm speaking from, actually it can reinforce the very power structures, which at this point we have to begin to dismantle. So, more than anything, the work of restitution is about how can we state our locatedness, positionality and so the privilege while undermining it. Because if this work isn't hurting, if this work isn't, if something isn't being given up, then we're not really, you know, we are getting this right. So the museum is one which was arranged according to a particular theory. Here is the diagram from the 1870s that sums up what that theory was, which is in many ways a diagram of the evolution of the wooden stick. These are the theories of weapons that all come from a single culture from Aboriginal Australia. They were assembled by the man after whom the museum is named Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pit Rivers, and he drew this diagram based on a series of items, all of which are which we can locate in the museum today that are real objects. And he arranged these items moving out from the centre. As you can see, on the right hand side, there's a series of shields at the bottom, there are lances, there are boomerangs and so forth. And he organised these items in order to make the points that objects can be said in some ways to evolve. Is there a problem? No. Okay, go ahead. Okay, we'll just take a moment. Yeah, okay, I can carry on. I don't need the images. So, if you look at the heart of that image, if we think about that idea that you can order objects in that way in an evolutionary way, he had no sense of the relative chronology of these items, of how old they really were, because he'd acquired them in London at the dealerships and from soldiers and so on. And in some ways also he acquired them from the Museum of the Royal Armouries and the Museum of the USI, the United Services Institute, which is now Rusey, which is a right wing military think tank, but in the 1860s and 1770s it had a museum. And so these museums at the Royal Armouries and at the USI were filled with all the weapons that have been taken in the previous sort of two centuries or so, from those against which the English had fought. And they had been held on to in order to seek to understand that weaponry actually better. So here we have a, in some ways, a very simple 19th century improvement narrative, that idea that objects over time change. But I think we need to think about it in two different ways as well. One is that this is a, is an idea of how things evolve, the cultures evolve that is based on weapons. There's a violence inherent already to how the thinking about artifacts is working. But also, of course, fundamentally the notion of sort of cultural evolution was intimately bound up with notions of a cultural supremacy notions that actually at the heart of of empire was the idea, you know, of a technological of a material superiority, that yes we can see in weapons, we can see on the battlefield, but also we can see in in all these other parts of how objects are made, histories of objects. So maybe if I was talking to you sort of 10 years ago even a little bit longer maybe I would have said that Augustus Pitt Rivers was on the right side of anthropological arguments at this point. He said that human diversity was based not on the biological. He wasn't an argue, he didn't argue for different species of human. He said we need to understand sort of sort of sort of a difference in between different people's viewers based upon different histories of objects, histories of the material culture. And so I would have said that I think now I would start with the observation that we see from France Fanon, you know in his essay in 1950s on on culture and racism, where he made the point that's what he called vulgar racism emerged in the 19th century and a different based on alteration on sorts of on the the the the biological ideas of nature. Really soon though that ideology was accompanied by something far more hard to grasp for us I think in the present day, which is a cultural racism. So in the UK in the 1940s after we beat the fascists. One of the first things that happened in the pit rivers. Next door to the pit rivers in the Natural History Museum was the racist displays of human skulls that told the racist lie that there are different types of human were removed. So next door in the pit rivers, the, actually the displays of sorts of cultural objects, which were there in order to tell precisely the same narrative. It's a narrative over supremacy it's a narrative. As we see here that has a violence inherent to it they were untouched we didn't see them for what they were we didn't recognize the hurt that they were doing. They were able to advance this sorry. How do I. There we go. So for me as a curator at the pit rivers, there was a key moment that happened in the, in the autumn of 2015. The most must fall ox, oxford movement center social media message that said that the pit rivers Museum is one of the most violent spaces in Oxford. So I haven't at that point I've been working there about eight years at that point I had never thought of it that way it had never occurred to me. The violence of the past could be there in the present every day that we open our doors, that we could be hurting people that we could be not only hurting the people who came into the museum but also the many who would never walk into the museum because they know what it is. They understand what they are what it is. So in the next sort of sort of minutes I want to talk to you about how the rose must fall oxford movement emerged. You know and how I think that helps us understand the situation that we find ourselves in in the museum's world. The rose must fall movement emerged in Cape Town in early 2015 and this was an intergenerational moment at which students at the University of Cape Town, who were born, you know actually after the end of apartheid in 1994. They were, they were 19 years old they were, they were, they were 20 years old, and they still experienced racism, you know, in their in their everyday lives at an institutional level, you know at the university and then the, at the heart of the university at the centre of that academy, there was an image of roads, Cecil roads, the mass murderer, the diamond minor, the, the architect arguably of what would, you know, evolve into apartheid, the, you know, his sort of really the corporate colonialism which he engaged in with the South Africa company and what's now is in Broadway and South Africa was central in how we think about and understand race and racism in the present. But his image, this artwork at the heart of the academy was part of what hadn't been removed what was still there. So there's an innovation there then that ideologies of racism used art and culture to make their world a vision last. So in the fall of 2015, when the roads scholarships led to Zimbabwean and to South African students who had seen that those those sort of protests have been part of that movement. So when they arrived in Oxford, in the foot, you know, in October of 2015, suddenly they found that Oxford also has a set of roads. And what does that mean for Oxford as an institution and so the movement the Rosemars fall lots of movement started to point out the ways in which empire was built into the naming of the libraries at all souls college the country named after a 17th century Caribbean slave trader than the the architecture of the old India Institute and obviously roads himself as well. But at the heart of it and I think this is the point at which when people are outside your music, your music and are undertaking a protest, you have really to start to listen to what they're saying and to understand it, and it rivers, which was absolutely at the heart of that campaign. It wasn't the weapons on the upper gallery that were actually being being sort of highlighted it was the case of the court art from what is now Nigeria and so the Benin case. I want now to tell you about that case and about how many other objects that there are elsewhere in the world from that event. And so the Benin artworks that are in Spain as well as in the UK as well as in the other countries, Berlin, and so forth are the product of an expedition and military attack that was very much part of the same corporate colonialism that we saw in the war in the case of the South Africa Company of Cecil Rhodes, but this was the this was the agency of the Royal Niger Company, and also the Niger Coast protectorate remember looting has this particular relationship not to sort of colonies, as much as to protectorate as much to these zones on the outskirts, the edges of empire. So in a Spanish context when people say, Well, we didn't really have much land in Africa that sort of misses the point, which is that so much of this activity was, you know, at the margins was about the military's engagement it was about the militarism. So this was the most iconic but only one of a whole series of expeditions that were undertaken by the, the series of the European powers to remove King's chiefs other people that were in the way of the the attempts to expand in in the world to become Nigeria, the rubber industry and the the the industry over the over oil, a palm oil. So the palm oil industry is about the history of margarine the sort of rubber industry is about the history of the tires for the bicycles. But at Oxford. Don's would have been cycling around. So in this attack upon an ancient kingdom. You know, a long sort of royal line that reached back in time in an unbroken lineage. Earlier than Elizabeth the first. This was one of the great urban civilizations of this area of West Africa. You know, and it was one that had this, this absolutely unknown sort of sacred royal artistic tradition that was revealed as a part of the sacking of the city. So in order just to give you a sense of what objects were taken the more than 10,000 objects that were looted at that time. I guess most iconic are the plaques the relief plaques that told the history of each of the Obers the Kings over time. And so we have the Royal Court the interactions with the Portuguese and so forth. So we know there are more than 1200 of those that are identified that were taken at that point. Here are a number of them on the left hand side in London. But on the right hand side here is the case of the pit rivers that underlines the sheer diversity of other arts works and objects that were taken. And in the top there's a hole out of out of which these sorts of ivory tusks the carved ivory tusks that again with the unique iconography that we see on the right hand side there is a document of the history of the Royal Court of the each of the achievements of the each of the achievements of the Obers. There are also other sculptures in a bronze such as at the top left hand side the hornblower or the leopard. And then a host of other sources sort of examples of ivory works such as such as the sort of hip ornament mask that we see in the bottom left hand side. So the whole host of items made of coal work made of ivory made of other materials especially bronze. So, here's an image. Here's a rare photograph of one of the alters sort of actually on which these Royal sacred items were put. The removal of artwork at this point wasn't just a side effect of a military attack it was a military tactic. The removal of of sort of sovereignty was at the heart of what the what was attempted to be done because the oboe was in the way as I have said of the of the rubber industry of the expansion of sort of your trade in those ways. So, what about the destruction of the traditional religions and about the long standing dispossession of culture. So within weeks, these items were were actually in London in Oxford, Berlin on display. You know they were on display, not sort of randomly in, you know anthropology museums, they were displayed in the British Museum alongside ancient Egypt. So the message couldn't be sort of more obvious we have blown you back, you know into the bronze age your culture is dead, we're going to display your living culture as if it was archaeological. So that use of the museum is not something whereby the soldiers went in and artworks were carefully taken and they were preserved in the museum as we're often told. This looting was a was a totally chaotic free for all, where more than 200 soldiers and sailors and administrators simply took what they could. So the items found their way onto the open market very soon. Some were held on to by families and were passed down from one. So the son or the daughter and they then sort of enter into the art market over the course of the 20th century and that actually role of the art market is something again that reinscribes this corporate violence that we see right from the outset. One of the things about the taking of artworks was it happened hand in hand with the taking of photographs in the book I sort of talk about the violence of the image and the violence of the work that is done in the taking of the photographs and think of this instance simply as sort of that image on the right of the taking of artworks but we need to remember how bound up this was with the physical destruction of the city. So it's a sacred royal landscape destroyed. And in 1899 when the first of the Hague conventions, you know that restricted what one was able to do in war. So many of the things that happened in the Benin attack of only two years earlier, we're in there. So the banning of the destruction of villages in which innocent people are living, the banning of the desecration of a religious site, the banning of looting the banning even of the use of the filed down bullets that the British used, you know in their machine guns in to maximize the physical damage because it turns out that that 1884 wasn't only the year in which the pit rivers was founded 1884 was also the year of the Berlin Congress. So in the European nations started the, the, what we often euphemistically in English called the scramble for Africa, which is a term that makes it sound as if this is just a bunch of sorts of European Boy Scouts who are elbowing away to get here or there and it serves to entirely remove any sense of the scale of African loss African deaths. But 1884 was also the year of the invention of the maxim, which was the machine gun that made this sheer level of violence sort of enter a new phase so think back to the diagram of the weapons and the evolution of the weapons and then think about the machine gun. So fundamentally the technological superiority the theory of material culture finds itself on the battlefield and those items from the battlefield find their way into the museum very quickly. And that is actually complicit. That's, that's, that's the point that was the realization for me, you know, from having heard the voices from our Africa and their colleagues who were outside the museum for further those must fall movement One of the really important context I think for this meeting for this audience is how the fallism movement, the movement to remove the statues of colonialists that are built into the built environment, you know, outdoors into our cities has exactly like the restitution movement has been an African led movement that reaches back for decades. So the fallism movement we just need to think about Algeria in the 1960s we need to think about the long standing source of issues in America and so on over over the Confederate statues these are not ideas that come out of nowhere they weren't just here. They, there has been an awareness that the ideology of supremacy was sort of built into the interculture in these ways for a long time, so to for restitution. So here's an image of over. Here is an image of Oprah Kenz were the second, who was early as 1938 was receiving returned goods that were taken actually in the expedition. Here's where the coal worker clowns and also, and also the coal road. So the restitution movement in the UK. It's a particularly important point for the, for the 100 year anniversary of the Benin attack in 1997. And there were campaigns outside what was then the Museum of mankind, which of course is now folded back into the British Museum. And interestingly, that moment at the 100 year anniversary is having a having having an echo now. You know as we, as we approach the 125th anniversary of the attack. Next year. I'm going to tell you about all the, all the made up words and the theoretical sides of the book. But let me just tell you one thing that's a part of that, which was my sense that as an anthropologist and archeologist and art historian. So many of the basic theoretical ideas, framings ways of thinking, and even the vocabulary is that I would naturally reach for simply were inadequate in this context so one example would be there is no more familiar idiom. The more culture studies may be than the notion of the life history of the object, the biography of a thing as it moves from one context into another it gains an extra set of meanings. Here in this context that seems completely wrong there wasn't anything added when they these objects were taken in the in these acts of violence and displayed in London. They were moved. So in the book I use a shield and Ben Bay's accounts of the necropolitical, which is, which is his own critique or reworking of the Foucaultian notion of the biopolitical, the sense that in institutions for Foucault like hospitals or there are regimes of the politics of life well actually and Ben Bay says in this day and age when Africans are dying and those from the Middle East, who are displaced are dying every year in the Mediterranean as we seek to maintain the boundaries of a fortress Europe. We need a politics of who live, who gets to live and who dies and necropolitics, well maybe for objects we need something similar so that sense of the necrographic rather than the, the, the, the notion of the biographical was one example of how just we need to try to reframe or invert or flip our sorts of ideas that we use. And so just to wrap up, what does this mean how can we learn from the Rosemars fall movement but also from the right from, you know, from this wider ongoing anti racist and civil rights movement that we see internationally right now. Well I would say my colleague, Nick mezzo's work, and his book that you can download online, which he calls the appearance of black lives matter. He's a visual activist he talks about sort of different sort of regimes of visuality here not in the context of what happened last year, or even in 2018 but in the context of the racist murders of Eric Ghana and also Michael Brown from 2014 to 2017 and Nick makes one completely but totally devastating observation, which is that it was a shift in our regimes of visuality. It was a shift in our modes of seeing that made the moment the ongoing moment of the politics of the black lives matter movement happen. Because it was the dash cam footage and the cell phone footage that made visible anti black violence that's been happening for centuries. This is, this is a politics and a set of sorts of possibilities that comes out of seeing, and of the right to look the right to see. And after that, in the context of the racist murder of George Floyd, the comments by a turn by by the minute by the Minnesota Attorney General in April this year who was speaking at the point of the verdict on George Floyd's murder. And I wouldn't call today's verdict justice because justice implies true restoration, but it is accountability, and accountability is a crucial first step towards something like your social justice. For museums, what does this mean well my answer in the actually in the book, you know is to begin to list where are the Benin bronzes and it turns out there's even some I'm afraid in Spain. It turns out that over 150 institutions around the world hold these things the sheer violence of that act in in in 1897 ripples down the ages. There's an updated version of this with some corrections in the paperback edition that's out now. And of course that list risks making some mistakes it risks talking about other people's collections. But that's what we need and I think in in part that that sort of transparency. That's set of seeing in those ways is what has started through this long standing campaign from Nigeria to see the return to the announcements we've seen from the Germans and other actually they just signed the MOU yesterday. So the decisions from, you know from the University of Aberdeen from the Fowler Museum at UCLA, from, you know from the National Museum Island we're still waiting for a Spanish institution to make such an announcement, but the times of London when when that announcement came came from from the University of Aberdeen. The Times of London altered their editorial line, and they said this was the right thing to do and for the UK. That's a massive thing that a right wing newspaper of that kind would have made that point. So I'm going to wrap up there. You know I think I just need to end. I think by saying that for a lot of people returning objects is a distraction from the real work of anti racism, sort of ideas over art and culture over the museum itself in order to create something, some sort of ongoing enduring propaganda. The work of the museum is to keep things the same that was used actually in the proto fascist 1890s, you know as a way to make the violence last. So every day we open our doors, you know, you know, sort of onto displays where the demand of the sacred or royal objects has not yet been met. And you re-inscribe that violence this isn't as I said at the beginning about sort of sort of emptying out our museums it isn't about returning everything it's about giving back when asked it's about the fact that if you have something stolen that you didn't yourself steal that doesn't mean it's not stolen. So mentally, we have I think to sort of use this moment which is there's a, you know, there's a real window of opportunity for us to remake world culture museums we've never needed something like a world culture museum more than we do in this moment. These are the cultural spaces for anthropology and archaeology and art. These are locations where we're able to celebrate and understand ways of making ways of seeing ways of a being that are outside of our conventional Eurocentric lens. So as long as they justification for empire and white supremacy, then we're never going to allow these museums to be what they could be, we're going to keep using them as a mode to keep some people out of culture and some people in. One of the sort of motos of the book is that as the border is to the nation state, so the museum is to empire. These are 19th century technologies, the border and the museum that are used to tell us that there are different sorts of people. We're able to categorize them in different ways we need to find other ways of thinking about the museum in those ways so I'm going to finish there. Thank you so much. Thank you very much Dan for your very clear presentation. It's always helpful to follow presentation with concrete examples and you've been doing this very clearly. We now have time for questions from the audience. Professor will be answering. Good morning. Good morning. Okay, I hope you can hear me. I have a question regarding the impact or the response both on your book but also on your discourse on the return of objects from the museums and this is something that we are really looking into from here because of this very week. We were celebrating the 12th Columbus Day, which led to quite a discussion of also some statements from right wing parties and not necessarily just right wing parties, but probably stemming from some whiteness frailty that sometimes relate here into Spanish or Catalan frailty where this type of discussion on the return of objects led to polarization and quite a significant divide. So I'd like to know what's been the impact in the white community and among the anti racist allies. Okay, wonderful. Thank you so much. It's a really important issue. And so I'm really happy that you've raised it. So yes, I mean I think the accusation that an openness to to restitution is either an attack upon museums or a sign of weakness reminds us that we're talking here about machines for cultural whiteness for the production of cultural whiteness. Of course I mean I have essentially been accused in some parts of the right wing press in the UK of being a source of race traitor, because if whiteness is a product of a certain set of cultural devices. You know, then, as soon as you start to undermine those, then some something really worrying for the light for the far right starts to happen, but we also expose how those notions of supremacy are built right into into the heart of our institutions, absolutely into the heart of our museums and our universities. So most of us that work in the museums though of course we've been here before. So in the 1990s, there were arguments that the restitution of human remains in terms of indigenous communities and you know ancestral human remains, or indeed the return of Nazi loot. So the return of Holocaust spoliation. These were seen as absolutely controversial. The same questions were asked, you know, are you attacking our museums where are these objects going to go. But, but importantly the Washington principles of 1998 shifted the owners it shifted the burden of responsibility for knowing what what is in the collections from the, the, the claimants over to the institution. So that's what's now happening I think for African cultural restitution and we need to actually continually remind people that we're not, you know that this isn't the work of activists. You know, in some cases it is, it is listening to the communities who are outside our institutions and are shouting that they want to return they want to change. But we are doing our job. This is a normal part of the professional practice of how we work in museums when did we start with the idea that the museum is a is a prison. The museum is an end point that a museum is where objects go to die. You know there have been restitutions for many years up until the 1960s. And I think Benedict Savoie's new book, which at the moment is only in a German it's called Africa's Africa's camp, um, Zeina couldn't stop because struggle for her art. She underlines absolutely centrally how so many of the legal restraint and the myths that hold us back from returning from the return of objects were invented. You know in the 1960s in the, in the years after, after independence, you know, sort of after and so after African independence where there was an awareness there was a worry that items were going to be asked for to be returned. So the Germans and the French and the British were talking to each other about how to avoid these, you know these things happening. So yeah, I mean we will hear from some that this is either we're being fragile or we're or we're being or we're making an attack on museums, but we need to hold our nerve, you know in the museum in, you know, all of those of us that work in museums, so that we can allow our ethical practice, you know, to evolve. Any further questions? No, it's not working. No, sorry, it's not working. Well thank you very much for your presentation. I found the opportunity to read your book and I found it an interesting necessary book to advance this discourse when it comes to recitation. But my question is maybe more of a technical answer, because we absolutely agree that we need to return the objects that have been looted. But in the Savoia report, I'd like to know what's your take on the reversal of the proof of burden. The fact that any object that cannot be proven that it has been illicitly acquired must be recited. So I'd like to know what's your view on that because it seems clear that anything that has been illicitly claimed, either stolen or looted, needs to be recited. And I would understand that you would support, in the case of the Benin bronzes, before even there were enforced laws that would limit plundering in the event of a war, because I think before that, plundering in the event of war was even suggested, recommended before it was legitimized from a legal standpoint. So I'd like to know your view on this, on the reversal of the proof of burden. Okay, thank you so much. It's a really important issue. So yeah, I mean I think in terms of legal, in terms of the notion that it was legal to steal or to loot, I think we need first off to recognize that there are legal dimensions to African societies as well. That's the, you know, so when the French, you know, Ministry of Culture says that the returns that Macron has overseen to Madagascar and to Benin and to Senegal do not in any way sort of compromise the important principle of inalienability of objects owned by the French that completely misses the idea of the fact that these items were inalienable also for the African societies from which they were taken. So first off we need to think about, actually I mean what are we counting as law here. And I think the second thing is we need to be aware that looting, yeah, I mean objects have always moved from A to B, right? This is not a movement that's about some obsession that every object should be where it was made and everything goes back to where it sort of began. That isn't the question at all. Looting became something very specific. It became an action at a scale, at an industrial scale, in terms of the military action that was entirely different to anything that had gone sort of earlier. And it was bound up with ideologies of race and ideologies over cultural supremacy, and that phase of the Anthropology Museum that we have faced up to when it comes to racism in physical anthropology, and we have not faced up to when it comes to cultural anthropology. So we have to say that actually the systematic removal of items which were sacred and royal from African sort of entities, African cultures, you know, of course, that's an entity that's a set of actions that are very different from other contexts. It's a case by case approach. And I think thirdly, we have to say that this isn't about sending back, it's about the giving back of items when asked. And yes, I mean there are some nation states, some royal courts in Africa and so on who are demanding items to be returned, there are others who are not. And so we simply and of course we know from the restitution of ancestral human remains from Holocaust context from very different historical context of Holocaust sort of loot that these things take time that restitution is not an overnight thing where you just empty out the museum. And so it's about the building of the relationship sits about being, it's about going at a certain pace. That's why the book talks about a decade of returns the idea this over the course of the 2020s, we will learn how to do restitution the many paths. Actually that restitution can take. Sometimes it's about signing over legal ownership and we don't have to overly emphasize the physical movement of the object. Sometimes it's other roots. Sometimes restitution is also about reparation. Sometimes it's about sort of memory, or sort of post memory. Sometimes it's about reimagining anthropology museums as really source source of urgent public spaces for reckoning with the histories of empire, but returning objects when asked, has to be the first sort of point of all of this. So I hope that that goes some way to answer your, your important question. I have a question from someone who's following us online. She's Professor Clement in the list. Maybe you know, yes. Yes. She'll be taking part in this afternoon session and she just sent us a question for you through the chat. I have a question to Dan Higgs. If museums have to give something up. Then how can the Pete Rivers Museum, as a colonial museum, continue to operate on the public through the effect of bloating and trauma, and not closing its doors as a monument to slavery and exploitation. Absolutely. Well, thanks for that. Hello, Clementine. And so I look forward to seeing you later, I hope. So yeah, I think if I understand the question, right, it's should we shut down the pit rivers. I mean, I, personally, am certainly very interested in the notion of naming the pit rivers. I'm certainly very interested in the physical dismantling of what in the book, I call the white infrastructure of colonial museums. So whether we simply have no need for anthropology museums in the 21st century. Actually, I don't think that as I was saying earlier. You know, actually, I think we've never needed something like a world culture museum more than we do right now. So I think simply to sort of shut the doors. Yeah, I don't know what would we do next what would what would happen next. So, you know, I think for me. There were there were ways of dismantling there are ways of reimagining the museum as a site of conscience. So, so much I mean what I do agree with is that we need to do something that's at the very least a metaphorically like the shutting of the door we need to do something like some major break with what anthropology sort of institutions have have been because the predicament that the anthropology museum finds itself in is, is I think fundamentally the same predicament that anthropology as a discipline finds itself in. So if we need anthropology and archaeology in some form, then we need the public space that those disciplines have made. So that's about reimagining the pit rivers in different ways, I don't know, but I am an advocate for us to retain and to, and to reimagine and transform. You know, World Culture Museums as the public spaces of anthropology. We have one more question from the audience but quickly please raise your hand. Yeah, just one thing. These objects were taken from Benin not being museum artifacts or museum artworks, but with restitution, their role is completely altered. And because of their setting in here and not in there, they have become museum artifacts have there been any proposal on what to do with the objects there. Are they to be displayed to turn them into museum objects or regardless of what might be their previous functionality. Okay, yeah, it's a really important issue. So I mean, in my view, if you give something back, actually you give it back, you don't ask what someone's going to do with it next. In the context of ancestral human remains. We do not say when we return those, you know, to First Nations or Native Americans, or to marry groups that they have to display those music, you know, those ancestors in the museum, actually normally they are destroyed they are buried in the very different historical circumstances of of Holocaust roots. The arguments were put in the 90s that if you return these items these artworks, you know, to their rightful owners well, what if they sell them what if they're not available. They're actually to see for the public. Well, yes, I mean they're their objects they can do what they want with them. So I think it's incredibly important that we don't interest ourselves in and we don't put conditions for return that you need to build a museum that you need to have the museum working exactly like a Western Museum. You know, all those things because so often those arguments are simply put to hold up the work of restitution to sort of make it not happen. At this time, certainly in the case of Benin, there is a really important museum project that is going ahead with the, the architects of David RJ. There's there's a lot of excitement in Edo state over the return of these these important cultural sacred world works, which will of course be able to inspire, not only in terms of art and culture but design identity fashion. All sorts of things the these these artworks are able to inspire locally. You know if they're able, if they're able to be seen. So the old arguments that Africans simply needed to get on an airplane if they wanted to see their own culture was already looking pretty shaky with the changing visa regimes that we've seen in Europe and in North America over the past 30 years. After COVID after lockdowns where we really start to wonder with environmental change, are we ever really going to see the millions and millions of people who who actually visit these hyper concentrations of sort of world culture in the so called or the self announced universal museums. Actually, localism is amazingly important as well. So I do think we're seeing the model of what a museum can be reimagined on. I think we're seeing an African sort of model I think all of the you know so many of the best ideas and some thinking about sort of what a museum can be is being is actually a coming from across the continent of Africa. And I think we will see a whole host of different models for how we can think about a museum being led from African colleagues. So I hope that goes some way to answering your question. I have one more question from the audience and very shortly please. Yeah. Sorry. But I see that your proposal is to go far beyond the idea of who possesses what in that sense I believe we have many more possibilities now that we used to have 20 years ago. We have digital possibilities to to collect all the information and to spread this knowledge back to the places. So as to restore not only of course the possibility of having the object, but of having the possibility of getting the whole context of the knowledge he provides. And then this is obvious of course. My question is, what steps have been taken up till now, for example, at the British Museum or other museums, you know, or other creators you deal with. And the budget. This is the second part of the question the budget we should assign to this sort of projects to be very huge. So this is a person one of the hindrances. Okay, well if I understood right, it's a question about the role of digital in this. And I think just to answer very quickly. Fundamentally we learned from Sarsav Ra from the Sarsav Ra reports. That's a key idea that's been missing from our discourse has to be introduced and at the time that Sarsav Ra came out I was, I was a visiting professor at the Musee de Cabe Ron Lee. And some of my colleagues were totally shocked that this idea was introduced into the debate, which is the idea of the consent. And they said, what is the this language of sexual violence, what is this sort of doing in the museum space. Fundamentally consent is important when it comes to understanding what was taken. It's crucial when it comes to ideas over digital or copies or the idea that you scan and print something and make a copy these are not our objects in many cases. And so, fundamentally, handing over agency seeding that authority and that control, ensuring consent on all sides that has has to be at the heart of a new ethics and what's actually in the Sarsav Ra report is called a relational ethics for how we work in museums. Okay, I'm here. Thank you, Professor Hicks for your presentation questions, answering your question, the questions of the audience. We'll have a quick break and we'll be back at half past 11. Thank you very much.