 Welcome everybody. Welcome to our symposium, Contested Collections Grappling with History and Forging Pathways for Repatriation. My name is Jadal Burrow. I'm the librarian curator for Southeast Asian Studies and Pacific Island Studies here at UCLA, and I'm one of the co-leads for the symposium's planning team. This afternoon's program is the last of the four programs of the symposium, and we will be talking about Paving a Way Forward, Current and Future Approaches to Restitution. So let us now begin with a welcome from Virginia Steele, the UCLA Norman and Amina Powell University Librarian. Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us for this symposium, Contested Collections Grappling with History and Forging Pathways for Repatriation. My name is Ginny Steele, and I am the Norman and Amina Powell University Librarian at the UCLA Library. As we begin today, I would like to acknowledge that as a land grant institution, we at UCLA acknowledge the Gabrielino Tongva peoples as the traditional land caretakers of Tobongar, which includes the Los Angeles Basin and the South Channel Islands. Consistent with our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, we believe that understanding the historical and current experiences of indigenous peoples informs the work we do. So again, thank you for coming today. We're really happy to have you here as we open this discussion about repatriation, particularly repatriation as it applies to materials that are held in libraries and archives. As many of us may have realized when thinking about the general topic of repatriation, much of the discussion we've heard over the last several decades has focused on artifacts in museums and art held in museums and galleries, but there's been relatively little attention paid to materials that are in libraries and archives. At UCLA, we were contacted a few years ago by a Jewish institution in Munich to return a book to our collection that belonged to their library, but was looted by the Nazis. We gladly returned the item but didn't think much more about it. Then last year we were contacted another time, a second time, this time by the Jewish Museum in Prague. A curator there contacted Diane Mizrahi, our librarian for Jewish and Israel Studies. They had identified three books through Hathi Trust that rightfully belong to their library. The scanned images in Hathi Trust included their property stamps and accession numbers. When Diane communicated the news to her colleagues in the International and Area Studies Department in the UCLA library, their outreach team led by Jade Alburo felt that it was important not just to share what UCLA is doing in repatriating these books, but to use it as a jumping off point to initiate a broader dialogue about repatriation, why there's a need for it in the first place, and why it continues to be a difficult and complicated discussion. This symposium provides a more global context for this conversation by acknowledging the long history of colonialism, war, and even field research that has led to cultural heritage materials being taken from their communities and countries. As libraries, archives, and other cultural memory institutions begin to talk about decolonizing their collections, it is crucial to recognize that decolonization is not just about adding underrepresented voices to our collections, but it's also about understanding how materials in our collections came to be there, how they were obtained, whether they were taken from their original owners without their consent, and whether and how they should be returned to the communities and individuals from whom they were taken. In this symposium, you will hear about various issues related to repatriation, including notions of ownership and caretaking. You'll hear examples from museums and libraries, because we hope that many institutions will be interested in exploring and implementing reparative practices. You will also hear examples of existing policies and procedures that institutions and government agencies have put in place, and will have some ideas for working with the communities that own the materials in the first place. We're very happy to have you with us as we explore this for ourselves and determine what our next steps should be. At the UCLA library, we are very committed to restitution, and we do expect to do more in the future. We hope you will be too. I'd like to thank everyone at UCLA who's been involved in the planning of this symposium, Jade Alburo and Tula Orem for leading the planning team, as well as members Alina Ising, Dana Laterer, and Yasenia Perez. Additional thanks to Sharon Farb, Shannon Tanhai Ahari, Giselle Rios, Magali Salas, the library communications team, and library business services. And thank you to the UCLA Allen D. Levy Center for Jewish Studies for cosponsoring this symposium. We appreciate all the hard work of all these individuals and the contributions that have been made, and we thank you for bringing us all together. And to our viewers and members of the audience, thank you again for joining us today. I look forward to continued discussion with many of you as we all try to figure out what the best way is to approach the need for us to look at our collections and identify materials that were taken without consent from their owners and return them to the communities and individuals where they belong. Enjoy the symposium. Thank you so much, Ginny, for the for that welcome. It is now my pleasure to introduce to you our moderator, TK San Juan. TK San Juan is a certified archivist, librarian, and DJ and over the past 13 years, she has worked with UCLA and the University of Texas Austin to build preservation partnerships for human rights documentation and cultural heritage materials in the US, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. She holds a master's in library and information sciences and MA in Latin American Studies from UCLA. In 2017, she was named a Fulbright specialist in library and information science. And in 2018-2019 she was a Fulbright scholar with Mexico's Ministry of Culture. Since 2001, TK has worked in community radio and currently hosts the program the archive of feelings on double.com. Everyone, please welcome TK San Juan. Thank you so much for the introduction Jade. And thank you to the organizers again for putting together such a thought provoking symposium. It's now my pleasure to introduce our next distinguished panelists. To bring us off, we have Leila Amina Dole, who is a founder of Amina Dole and Associates. She is a leading expert in art, cultural heritage and intellectual property law and has represented a wide range of entities such as collectors, museums, galleries, dealers, nonprofits, artists, foundations and foreign governments. She has been involved in high profile contractual disputes, cultural heritage law violations, the recovery of stolen art and antiquities, complex fraud schemes, authentication disputes, art bat loans, and the sale of hundreds of million dollars of arts and collectibles. Leila also regularly lectures internationally and publishes on a wide variety of legal topics in addition to teaching courses on international art and cultural heritage law at Fordham University School of Law and art crime and the law at New York University. Please join me in welcoming Leila. Thank you so much for the introduction and thank you and thank all the organizers for inviting me to speak on this panel today. Before I begin, I want to just perhaps preemptively apologize. I told my fellow panelists that my husband had just tested positive for COVID and my young child may break into the room at some point during the talk. I'm trying to avoid that. But there's a chance that a toddler will come running onto the screen at some point. So I apologize in advance. As I only have a short time to discuss this very broad topic of the restitution of cultural heritage. I've chosen a few of my favorite cases to discuss and I'm only providing a very cursory analysis of these matters. I'd also like to note that I'm a US attorney so my scholarship is primarily focused on US law. Cultural heritage disputes generally begin in one of three ways. First, foreign government may file a lawsuit for the return of looted property. Second, the foreign government may request the return of stolen property through private communications through negotiations and settlement discussions. Or third, US law enforcement authorities may investigate claims and file legal actions for the return of objects. And I'll discuss each of these scenarios this afternoon. One of the most famous antiquities repatriation cases involves poor mosaics that were stolen from Cyprus. The mosaics were pillaged from the Cypriot church following the Turkish intervention in Cyprus of 1974. By the end of 1976, all Cypriots living in the village where this church was located, they had fled. Afterwards, the mosaics were violently removed from the church and ushered onto the black market. In 1979, Cyprus learned that the mosaics had been stolen and a fervent campaign began to locate the artifacts. In 1988, an American dealer named Peg Goldberg flew to Europe to purchase a painting. That sale fell through, but within days of seeing photos of the mosaics, Goldberg purchased them for a little over $1 million. She tried to sell the works by contacting collectors who might be interested. In this way, word of each church authorities, that the works were in Goldberg's possession and then the church requested their return. The church even offered Goldberg reimbursement for the purchase price. She refused so the Cypriot church sued. The case actually involves very complex issues related to choice of law determinations with Goldberg zealously arguing that the case should be dismissed because the mosaics were removed long before the church filed its lawsuit. Ultimately though, the litigation proceeded. The court determined that the property was stolen and Goldberg was ordered to return the items. The court found that Cyprus adequately demonstrated the suspicious circumstances of this sale. First, Goldberg knew the mosaics came from a conflict zone. Second, they were cut away from a building and of our unique cultural value. Third, they were purchased for a low price of only little over a million dollars in contrast to the market price in mosaics, which was $20 million. Fourth, Goldberg knew little of the salesman. And in fact, one of them happened to be facing criminal charges for other art crafts. And finally, the sale occurred very quickly within just a matter of days. Goldberg did not conduct due diligence and she perjured herself by lying about the transaction. The court ultimately found that she had acted in bad faith and that the works belong to the Cypriot church. So this case, the reason I'm mentioning this one is it's quite notable in your US jurisprudence because this US court was in a federal court in Indiana. The court acknowledged the importance of due diligence. Unfortunately, though, the works were irreparably damaged. Initially, they were removed from their location and then they were conserved, meaning that they were flattened to appear for sale in a commercial gallery. Mosaics were returned, but only as a result of a costly litigation and a lengthy battle. The specter of legal action will sometimes lead to voluntary returns, eliminating this need for costly litigation. And perhaps one of the most famous cases involving cultural heritage, I'll discuss the Euphronius Crater. In 1972, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the famed Euphronius Crater for, I think, $1.2 million. At the time, it was the most expensive antiquity acquisition in history. Then director of the museum, Thomas Hoving, announced that the crater had been purchased from a private English collector. But he refused to reveal the identity of the base's previous owner and of that dealer. Italian authorities were convinced it was looted, but they couldn't prove the object's origin. Decades passed and nothing could be done until evidence serendipitously revealed that the crater was indeed looted. In 1995, during a seemingly unrelated investigation over illegal trafficking, Italian authorities discovered evidence of a looting network revealing that the crater was stolen from an Etruscan tomb. Quite sadly, to avoid detection of customs, the base was broken into pieces. This very rare and very valuable object, it was intentionally broken so that it could be exported from Italy and into the US more easily. Due to Italy's strict patrimony laws, so this is the individual who was kind of the ringleader kind of at the center of this looting network. But due to Italy's strict patrimony laws, antiquities found within its soil belong to Italy and it's illegal to sell and export these objects without permission from state authorities. Patrimony laws are key for the protection of antiquities. These laws allow nations to protect the objects found within their borders by investing ownership of antiquities found within the country and to the country in which the object was found. Because the crater was found within the borders of Italy, it belonged to Italy. Once the Italian authorities had evidence the crater was looted, the country was able to bring a repatriation claim against the Met. However, the government never did so. They never had to biologically. Because the evidence was so clear, the Met and the Italian government signed an agreement under which the Euphronius Crater and several other items from the museum were returned to Italy in exchange for long term loans of Italian objects. The crater returned to Italy in January 2008. And now it's housed in the Archaeological Museum of Certificate as part of a strategy of returning works of art to their place of origin. So this matter, probably my favorite case involving cultural heritage or favorite matter involving cultural heritage. It's really important for a number of reasons. First, it was highly publicized, so it really drew attention to the problem of looting and the international market for looted artifacts. It demonstrated Italy's determination in recovering antiquities and it resulted in a successful loan program that led to a number of other museums repatriating works to Italy. Finally, the matter demonstrates the challenges for source nations. It's often difficult to prove when an object left the country. The possessor or dealer can concoct a false provenance or an ownership history, stating that it's been in a private collection since 1800s where some arbitrary date prior to the passage of a patrimony wall. Here, though, Italy was lucky in that the authorities uncovered written photographic proof of the looting. But most cases do not involve such clear evidence. And here the evidence was a collection of Polaroid photos that recorded the objects that were found looted that were brought on the market. And in some of those images, these artifacts were even covered in dirt and photographed in their fine spot. So this, I really don't think I have enough time to get into this, but what could the Met have done? Well, the Met could have more, you know, more strongly scrutinized these objects and conducted greater due diligence on the Euphonia's crater and other objects that eventually were returned to Italy. I think it's necessary that museums and art collectors not simply accept the representations of dealers and auction houses and those individuals selling these objects. So I think greater scrutiny is used. So I've discussed the situation in which a foreign government will sue for the return of an object, how a government and a private institution may just engage in discussions when there is some evidence to prove that an object is looted. And in some cases, US law enforcement authorities are involved in these repatriations. So I'll briefly address two matters because they were resolved in slightly different ways. The first one involves the dispute over this statue, which began in 2011, when the Kingdom of Cambodia initiated legal action against Sotheby's in New York. The auction house was selling this 10th century statue of an epic warrior that was purportedly looted in or around 1972 from co-cur. In fact, we can pinpoint the exact place from where the statue originated because of this photo. And again, we often don't have such clear proof of a fine spot, so this information is crucial in this case. After being hacked off its face, the work entered the black market and was sold to a Belgian collector in around 1975. As a way of context, Cambodia experienced a brutal period of conflicts and civil wars in the 1960s and the 1970s, during which time the archaeological site of co-cur fell victim to extensive looting. The collector's wife consigned the work to auction in 2010 and imported the statue into the United States. As Sotheby's researcher expressed concerns about the statue in an email stating that she thought it was stolen. But that expert later changed her opinion and advised the auction house that Cambodia generally doesn't request the return of looted art. So she was wrong. On the day of the auction, Cambodian officials requested that Sotheby's withdraw the statue and return it. Sotheby's did withdraw it, but supported the consignor's ownership plan. So the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ended up filing a forfeiture action. In December of 2013, the U.S. government and Sotheby's eventually signed a settlement agreement for the return of the statue. So why did Sotheby's settle? Well, the parties publicly stated that litigation would be burdensome. However, avoiding a court battle also avoids revealing harmful information during the discovery phase of litigation. During the phase when documents are exchanged and parties conduct depositions and interrogatories. So perhaps one of the reasons that this was settled is that perhaps that the auction house did not want to share all this information and have it become public. This case revealed though that the auction house did investigate the work and its history, but chose to ignore red flags indicating that the statue was looted. But due to that case, a number of other similar statues were returned. Around the same time as Sotheby's return, the Norton Simon Museum returned its own Cambodian statue to its home. That's at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the Norton Simon Museum, the work was returned as a gift. So I want to turn now to a case involving a private donor. And this is an image of a repatriation ceremony. And I'm actually going to end my talk with my perspective on why I think these ceremonies are so valuable and special. So this case, U.S. versus Schultz is one of the best known cases in U.S. law involving looted art. And it actually led to the imprisonment of an antiquities dealer named Fred Schultz. Fred Schultz was a well-known New York antiquities dealer. He still is. I mean, he's alive, although he no longer deals in antiquities. And he was the former president of the National Association of Dealers and Ancient Oriental and Permanent of Art. He eventually was indicted for receiving conspiring to receive stolen Egyptian antiquities. He worked with this man, Jonathan Togli Parry, a British tomb raider who smuggled antiquities out of Egypt. He is a self-proclaimed antiquities restorer known for smuggling over 3,000 pieces out of Egypt. He supplied Schultz with objects by disguising the antiquities as cheap souvenirs. So you can see it on this first slide that he would cover them in paper mache, paint them over to make them appear, make the actual antiquities look like they were cheap trinkets purchased in a bazaar. And then he also created this false provenance, this false ownership history by inventing a fictional collection. Many pieces were smuggled out of Egypt, including this antiquity on the left-hand side. In 2001, Schultz was indicted under the National Stolen Property Act. Under the Act, it is a crime to deal in property that has been stolen unlawfully converted or taken knowingly knowing the same to be stolen. The law applies to property that is stolen from a foreign government where that government asserts ownership of the property pursuant to a patrimony wall. So I mentioned the patrimony walls in Italy that protected objects found within its borders. The same for Egypt. Egypt has passed these laws. The earliest of its laws were passed in the mid-19th century. So Egypt has a long history of protecting its property by these patrimony walls. The objects that were smuggled in through Schultz and Togli Parri fell under this law, law number 117 of 1983. Schultz was tried before a jury and he served 33 months in jail and paid a fine of $50,000. The challenge, typically facing these source nations, like source nations like Egypt and Italy, is proving that property was taken from within its borders after these patrimony walls were put in place. Here, Jonathan Togli Parri kept a journal of his exploits. So it made it easier for authorities to prove that these parties were dealing with items that were removed from Egypt after its patrimony wall was put in place and that the parties knowingly conducted this type of illegal activity. Unfortunately, the legal framework that I've discussed is not enough to deter the illicit trade in art and antiquities and it also does not ensure that looted items are returned home. For one, as I mentioned, there are challenges proving that objects were removed in contravention of heritage laws, meaning that it's often difficult or even impossible to prove that an artifact was removed after a certain date. For fine art, it's the same. It's difficult to prove that an item was stolen or sold under duress, particularly because many collectors did not maintain extensive or detailed documentation about their art holdings. And I think we see this very clearly when we talk about Nazi looted art. When there is a displacement of millions of people who are fleeing their homes, they're generally not packing along with them documents about their art, sales receipts, sales and purchase agreements. So it's often hard for the victims of these thefts to prove that they own this artwork. Other problems are related to the system in which there are nations that have not developed laws in line with Western or European American, the legal systems, meaning that there are nations without patrimony laws or adequate regulations and laws to provide the basis for repatriation demand. This reliance on Western laws in restitution jurisprudence put other nations or groups at a disadvantage. A third challenge is that the owner of an object or collection of objects may not be a nation, but rather a community of people, such as indigenous groups that are not defined by geographical or sovereign boundaries. Another problem to consider is that the legal solution, and I often say this when I give lectures on the law, is that the legal solution is not always the just one. Heritage has been stolen under brutal and unjust circumstances, and there may not be legal remedies, at least as we know them, as we know them today for these thefts. The items stolen during these times may have not technically broken any walls, as the items were perhaps not owned in the Western definition of what ownership is. However, through today's ethical runs, there were takings that were part of a cruel or horrific campaign, and those should be reexamined and returned to honor ethical considerations. A very poignant example is the theft of the Benin bronzes that were stolen during the partition of Africa. Thousands of artistic treasures were stolen from the former Kingdom of Benin during brutal campaigns in that region. Museums and collectors today are considering, not all museums just to say, but some museums and some collectors have considered the return of some of these artifacts and have actually returned some of them due to ethical concerns, but not legal arguments. So fifth, and the last point I would like to make is that, you know, I talked about these three mechanisms in which objects are returned. But as a lawyer, I would say that sometimes the legal solution is not the best one that sometimes diplomacy is more effective than legal battles. Nations such as the Netherlands are engaged in diplomatic efforts to return works to former colonies, such as Indonesia and Sri Lanka. And of course, there are some legal complications there, which I guess we can address in the Q&A if people are interested. But there are some nations that are addressing this past and the return of objects. So although my talk is focused on antiquities and cultural heritage, some of the same concepts I've discussed apply to fine art books and other valuable cultural items. For example, the Nazi party in Germany attempted to legitimize their thefts by documenting the transfer of ownership during duress sales. Unfortunately, the law has not adequately addressed some of those controversies either. Last year, the United States Supreme Court dismissed a case against Germany involving a priceless collection of religious artworks. The case was dismissed due to lack of jurisdiction, this really technical argument. And the heirs of the owners of the collection never actually had their day in court. They alleged that the collection was sold under duress, but they never had the opportunity to prove this due to the case's dismissal. To end on a positive note, cultural heritage has been repatriated without parties resorting to litigation or contentious battles. There are people who do voluntarily return items that were illegally removed. Just earlier this week on Monday, I traveled to Texas. So I'm not from Texas. I'm up here in New York, which is why it might be a little bit noisy. But I traveled down to Texas for a ceremony celebrating my client's voluntary return of a marble bust to the rightful owner. The work was looted from Germany during World War II and went missing for over seven decades, and it was discovered in a goodwill store by my client. She chose to return the work to Germany. It was completely voluntary. She thought it was the rightful home, and I think that's something really nice to celebrate. In addition, nations are today engaging in discussions about how to repatriate objects taken during colonial periods. These discussions involve not only the law, but ethical and moral considerations as well. I think we have a long way to go, but it's really, I think it's really positive that these discussions are occurring with more frequency. Upon restitution, ceremonies are often held to celebrate returns. These are opportunities to educate the public about the art market. There are also opportunities to build diplomatic relationships and celebrate cultural exchange. But more than that, repatriations are an opportunity to honor the past and perhaps in some way attempt to correct the past. As we grapple with looting from past decades, past generations, we have the opportunity to treat these objects with respect and return them to their rightful homes. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much for sharing those fascinating case studies, Layla. And I want to remind everyone to please enter your questions for Layla into the chat box, or sorry, into the Q&A box, not the chat box. We will be responding to the questions after all the presenters have completed their presentations. So next up, we have Damien Webb joining us from Australia. Damien identifies as a queer Palawa man from Southeast Tasmania. He has worked in a number of roles at both the Western Australian and New South Wales State Libraries. He previously coordinated the State Library of Western Australia Storylines project and has a passion for decolonizing archives and library collections. In his current role as a manager of the Indigenous Engagement Branch at the State Library of New South Wales, he works with a small team of dedicated Indigenous and non-Indigenous staff to indigenize colonial institutional collections and practices. Please join me in welcoming Damien. Hi. Thank you. I hope you've been all hearing. Yeah, thank you. Firstly, thank you for having me here today. It is five, six o'clock in the morning over here in Australia, so you'll forgive if I'm a little bit blurry. As always in this protocol here, I would like to begin by acknowledging that I'm on the unceded sovereign country of the Gadigal people where I work and live and pay my respects to elders past and present. And I would especially like to extend that respect to any First Nations or Indigenous people that are joining us here today. I am a Palawa First Nations Indigenous man from Tasmania and a second generation queer, so I'm very used to working in uncomfortable spaces. I have a human rights background and as was just mentioned, I've spent about 10 years working in state libraries and archives to be that connective tissue between First Nations communities and often quite stodgy and terrified archives and memory institutions. I'm a curator, a library worker and a community outreach specialist, I suppose. And I currently convene Blackforce, which is the national First Nations support network for staff that work within states and national institutions. And I'm a member of two of the expert advisory boards for the Peak Library Organisations in Australia. So I've got a very good sense of what's happening in Australia from this perspective. And it's a pleasure to be able to share some of the good and the bad. I suppose it always strikes me as interesting in these international symposia and gatherings that Australia has seen to be quite ahead in a lot of ways in terms of some of the steps we've taken to address these issues. But I suppose the reality is that in some ways we have actually skipped a few steps. It's only been about 230 years since colonisation. And I have to say that in the Australian library context, restitution and redress of words I have almost never heard spoken. For those that aren't aware, crash course, there are hundreds of sovereign First Nations tribes and clans and family groups within Australia. There is no Aboriginal Australia as such. There is no central bloc or authority. What we have are many of these clans and families that are disconnected from their ancestral country, which is the term we use for homeland. Their family networks and their cultural knowledge. So this stems from the brutal history of colonisation, forced removals and genocides that formed the first 100 or so years. What we refer to as the frontier was in Australia. So as was mentioned, Virginia actually mentioned, libraries and repatriation is a strange idea. In the blood libraries, we don't see it with the same urgency or haven't until recently. We don't tend to how human remains. We often don't have cultural objects. What we have are representations or instances of knowledge which was stolen in much the same way. So many of the missing pieces from my family, from our people's cultures, from First Nations knowledge systems, which was an 80,000 year strong oral tradition. Many of these pieces are actually within the archives and collections of state and national libraries. And even more problematically, are contained within the collections of several colonists. And these collections form the basis of our earliest collecting efforts. So these include word lists of languages which were not lost, were taken, were stamped out and people are trying to rebuild. Songs and ceremonies, ethnographic and anthropological observations of our culture. Things like ration and blanket lists that often contain ethnographies and ethnologies that reveal family connections that people are desperately trying to make. So there is vital importance to ensuring that these collections are understood from the perspective of those that they impact the most. And that is still something we are struggling with. The library I currently work in is the oldest collecting institution in Australia. Began collecting in 1926, which is very young by international standards and very, very young by the standards of history and deep time that First Nations people in Australia understand history. I suppose to put it in context, the building itself is made of sandstone which was taken from the land. So the actual colloquial structure is made from our country. The mortar that holds these bricks together was made from our shell middens which were and remain evidence of our ancient occupation. Australia does not recognise our sovereignty and is still deeply divided over the facts that make up our violence and often genocidal history. And to many people in Australia, libraries still represent capital H history. I suppose I think of libraries and our traditions as an outsourced form of Western memory and legacy. I suppose for non-Indigenous and non-First Nations people, particularly white European traditions, are very comfortable with external institutions taking on that role of holding their memory, their stories, their anecdotes, their understandings. And that is definitely not the case for many First Nations people. As a result, these institutions and their legacies are deeply protected by the status quo. It's often not until you start digging into that and interrogating that the racism and the deep resistance to change starts to present itself. Libraries were and remain part of the colonial compile who were responsible for and continue to benefit from in many ways our destruction in Eurasia. That being said, there is a shift in libraries, particularly around interrogating these biases and blind spots. So we've seen basically, since its inception, the Library of Congress, such a cadence that you would decimal systems of classification have been brought in. They were never built for the kinds of ways that we remember and the kinds of knowledge that we prioritise or the kinds of cultural restrictions and hierarchies that present themselves in our knowledge systems. But we are seeing through some people may be aware, the OCLC Descriptive Workflows project, which I was part of, is really interrogating one, which is how we speak about these collections and the assumptions we carry in our systems. There are new engagement models all the time. Engagement is one of those bug bears for a lot of us that work in this sector as First Nations Indigenous people. Engagement can be anything from speaking to elders about critical cultural collections, or it can be doing one elder refer to as pretty business, which is having a morning tea for reconciliation, which doesn't really achieve anything, but allows institutions to fill it and step into that space. We are starting to see systems like ICIP, so Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property, where in Australia we don't have a legal framework to protect or reclaim the knowledge that is within these collections. ICIP is designed by a woman named Terry Jenke to fill in that gap where we don't have a legal framework to lean on, and instead looking at an aspirational moral framework, much more aligned with systems like Creative Commons. We are seeing the invocation of terms like decolonisation and truth telling, very, very regularly, but not always in critical sense. But in a classic library form, we do still seek to approach this as a problem to be solved, and ideally automated, if that's something that plagues libraries. Our need for efficiency organisations. So in Australia, we tend to use other words. We talk about reconciliation and we talk about recognition. And I suppose it's worth just taking a moment to consider how differently those words hit, and when you are trying to speak to and with communities that have had knowledge taken and now have to go back to the perpetrators to rebuild their own identity. There's a very well-known artist from my country in Tassie who says that I have nothing to reconcile. We've skipped over a step in Australia in many ways, and we're trying to reconcile two bodies of knowledge and two cultural blocks, I suppose, that do not have equal power and that hasn't really been understood. We talk about reconciliation or recognising traditional owners, but we need to understand who we frame in these perpetrators and who we place in the burden of finding a solution on when we talk that way. And I'm very excited about bringing more terminology around restitution into the work. So, as an example, more than 20 years ago, a group called ATSILER, Apologies for the Appliance, this was a First Nations-led group of experts that created a comprehensive set of protocols for working with First Nations knowledge, specifically libraries and archives. These are largely ignored by the sector, but remain a bible for those of us who are Indigenous in First Nations and work to effect change. As a result of a few recent projects, those are now being brought back to the fore, but it never ceases to amazing how many professional librarians that have worked in the sector for 30 or 40 years have never heard of them or have never even bothered to do a quick search for them because they are widely available. At some point during the digitisation craze, the fetish of the early 2000s, libraries, particularly here, started to invest in a concept known as digital repatriation. I'm assuming some people have courage of this term or have used this process. This is well-intentioned, but it is actually quite a flawed process. It uses the term repatriation, but it is actually usually a form of cultural-informed access. It's usually provided copies, and it is very important that we provide these copies to people that may not have seen members of their family that are seeing images or reading texts that helps them to read their identity. It is not the same as repatriation. It is not the same as returning control and authority, and we've become a little bit tangled in that term. So I usually prefer to refer to a digital return, but again, there are systems and ways to do that that tackle the crux of the issue. What's important to remember is that digitisation is a natural intervention point in our collection. The material is out there in the human being looking at it. If you don't capitalise on that moment to interrogate the material to bring those nations' perspectives in, and we just digitise with the information we have and probably to whatever system we're using, we're taking the entire proponent context and simply digitising that as well. So the Storylines project was mentioned. That was a project they worked on in Western Australia, largely around photographs. So the bulk of photographs, early photographs of First Nations people will have simple captions like, you know, you have seen the desert. They will have no attempt to identify those people to turn these into human beings that had families, that had authorities, that had stories. So there was about 5,000 photos returned, completely recaptured, completely rewritten basically. And then that information was added to the library record. So the good examples that I've seen, which are Storylines, some of you may have heard of Mukatura, and some of the community First Nations-led keeping places that are created using that software. So these things focus on community curation, the possibility and insistence on multiple truths, and working with the fragmented histories that our peoples carry. We often need to connect with each other and with these problematic collinear sources to actually paint a full picture. And most of the systems that we use, the digital asset management systems or access systems we use, are designed to really just focus on that one aspect. For me, this term decolonisation is vital, but we do have to think about the hardly limits of decolonisation. The reality that libraries who are steeped in Western employment history may not be able to learn a fully deep colonise. That's, instead we can look to ways that we can decentralise, that we can remove ourselves as the sole authority. So we talk of advisory boards, changes to descriptive workflows, but those bring us into the centre. Those force us to engage with the centre and with the libraries and authority. Instead, we're starting to look at ways that we can reverse that. So at the moment we've been setting up First Nations digitisation hunts in cultural, language and local museums that are First Nations run in regional areas. Rather than seeing the library as the natural point for collections to end it and to do live in, we recognise that some knowledge will never be appropriate to catch the institutions and that communities need to be empowered to work. Empowers are definitely not the right work, they already have power. They need to be recognised and supported to do that work. So we've set up four of these independent hubs, providing the technology, the training, the funding. So these materials stay on-country but are still preserved and described to a preservation standard. What this also does is remove one of the biggest obstacles to repatriation that we see in First Nations communities, which is the instance, kind of, moment where an institution tells you, you don't have the facilities or the training to look after this, you couldn't get it back, you'll be destroyed. It ends up time and time again. I said we're leveraging our expertise and instead of asking communities to translate themselves into our work, we try to do the opposite. We try to backlight resistance and priorities to community plans to recognise the knowledge and skills that they have in community as expertise. I am starting to realise, but I'll bring up one last point. None of this work can be achieved without human intervention. I think Australia is an issue. Two recent reports by Alia and NSLA, which are two of the peak bodies, highlight critical underrepresentation of First Nations employees. There are very few of us. In fact, there are only two First Nations staff members in the entire country within states and national libraries above my level and a manager. So we're not in positions of power. There are some instances where there is one First Nations person in the entire institution and all of that work, all of those relationships, all of that critical decolonisation, the opening of the archives falls on one person. So in the last two years, we actually run a project where all staff at all levels at every single state and territory of national library completed 20 hours of mandatory cultural safety training. So this was designed to help them understand the privilege and institutionalised racism and was very successful in shifting the perceptions towards the biases and the gaps and the holes in our work that often we only see from the outside. Unfortunately, it did depend on First Nations staff to deliver that because a firm believer that decolonisation cannot be undertaken without our input and otherwise it becomes a very circular labour-gazing activity. But the cost to us as staff was quite extreme. It exposed First Nations staff to some of the worst racism and staff use and work flows in order to try and help save the library from itself, which I have to say is a very important thing, but we do need to be aware that a project like that can necessarily counter this decolonisation. It still centres the settler columnist and while it is important to build their capacity and empathy and culture of disdain, it's never going to achieve what we need to achieve. I think anything that's comfortable cannot be critical and we all are supposed to remember that the core of our profession is about protecting memory and legacy and this is the source of many of our collections and the inspiration for many of our staff, but we have to consider whose forms of memory and whose legacies have been prioritised. Neutrality is a myth and in our profession a very dangerous and seductive one I found. I think that's my time, so I will now be back. Thank you. Thank you so much for that Damian. I really appreciated what you said about neutrality being a very dangerous and seductive myth and that's something that all information workers should keep in mind. Once again, just want to remind folks, please put your questions for Damian in the Q&A box. We will get to that after the last presentation. So lastly, I will be introducing Dr. Khadija von Zinnenburg-Carol. Unfortunately, Dr. Carol is not able to join us in person today to give her presentation because she had a conflicting event for her book launch. So we will be replaying a recording of her presentation, but we're hopeful that she'll be able to join us for the Q&A session afterwards. So Dr. Khadija von Zinnenburg-Carol is an artist and historian currently leading the project Repatriates, our artistic research in museums and communities in the process of repatriation from Europe. She is professor of history at the Central European University in Vienna and honorary professor and chair of global art at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of several books, including Art in the Time of Colony, The Importance of Being Anachronistic, Botanical Drift and Bordered Lives. Her latest book is The Contested Crown, Repatriation Politics Between Mexico and Europe, and that came out earlier this year. You can find more information about Dr. von Zinnenburg-Carol's work at kdja.org. Hello, everyone. I'm joining you now from Vienna, so very close to Prague. I'm heading up a research project here called Repatriates and New Originals. We are artists, a collective working on the process of repatriation and creative responses to these affective dimensions, especially of reparations. I'm particularly interested in shifting the popular image of the adventurer, the colonial fantasy, I guess, of imperialism that still holds a lot of Europeans in sway. And this is, of course, one of many such popular heroes of a kind, who is a tomb raider, a looter of artifacts. And it's those kinds of cultural artifacts taken during colonialism that is the focus of my work. So, just to introduce the themes and methods and ultimately the kind of ontological shift that I'm looking at in my work. There's a tension, obviously, at present in the so-called discussion of decolonization. That term in itself has been somewhat emptied out of its meaning. It's a very old process that has been happening through the 20th century. The politics, of course, of that are very strongly pitted against and with the ethics that are now making repatriations imperative. On the other side of that initial line at the top of this diagram, you see scientific conservation, something that is often used by museums to retain objects, to retain control, to retain a kind of a set of stipulations, let's say, which can be used in the case that I'll present today as a ruse to actually deflect repatriations. So we're dealing with material culture on one hand, but we're also dealing with a whole lot of legal, and we'll hear more about this from my colleague, legal issues and what happens when objects are given rights of their own, like a human right. Then we are actually in the realm of mediating between material and other agents that are not human entirely all. So we go in methodologies then into oral history and to performance into the ways in which there has been an interface between human and non-human agents, obviously, for a long time. Not so much, though, or in a very different way in current museology. So that's why we're working with this quite new idea of artistic research, and that is we're all practicing artists working with materials directly, but also conducting historical research, looking at how copies are produced, what is the significance of them, what is the ontological shift when you create copies of these kinds of originals that are or are not being repatriated, and what are then the roles, especially of a shifting emphasis on Indigenous knowledge and an understanding therefore of what we term intangible heritage or memory or the affective dimensions of loss and oblivion and these kinds of dimensions of historical repair that are becoming apparent through the restitution debate. This process has become one around the world and I'm really working comparatively with my team of researchers that are based in stakeholder communities and working very closely. So, for example, in Nigeria and Benin Republic, very familiar works perhaps there in the center, but also with contemporary artists like the National Museum at the top there where it says, Total Destruction is Eduardo Aberor's work of Mexican artist envisaging another kind of future for the museum in which it is actually dismantled. I will be discussing modes of hacking the museum. In my book, I talk about the ways in which people have conceived of looting of property ownership of all the many dimensions of the repatriation debate. And I use as a prismatic example this one headdress, this feather crown that is in Vienna, and that is a long standing claim from Mexico. So, to some extent we're working on the back of my cause promise to return objects from Sub-Saharan Africa in particular back from the Musée de Kébron Lee to these new museums that are opening around Africa present. We're going to Namibia this week with the German return from the Humboldt Forum, and I've been working in Vienna for a long time. This is a podium discussion we ran at the Weltmuseum Wien, which is the collection of ethnographic material in Vienna, of which I also do an ethnography in this book, mit fremten Federn, Ketzala Panikwatl, and restitution, this is a German recent publication that actually was launched this evening and why I'm pre-recording this lecture. In that book, I also create these relationships between historical moments in which the feather crown becomes a way of seeing the very complex power relations between, in this case, the Aztec and the Habsburg empires. You see here, for example, in the center, the execution of Maximilian, the Emperor of Mexico for three years, a Habsburg Emperor sent from Vienna, whose execution is the inception of the independent nation state. This is the work by Nina Höchtl, a Austrian artist living in Mexico, sitting who conceives in a lucha libre character and an actual kind of series of fights and cartoons and performances that have been going for the past 10 years of this battle, which is very deeply ingrained in the Austrian psyche. There are many operas through the 17th, 18th centuries that replay this conquest of the New World in a rather nostalgic and romantic way. So I trace, and these are each of these diagrams as an epigraph to each chapter, so it maps out what in that chapter, for example, here is a history of the display, the museum vitrines, the kinds of ways in which at first in the 16th century came into a wonder-comer in this castle, Ambras, and spent decades there as part of this very early display of curiosities, was also performed with, was part of an early interest in naturalia, in remedies, in plants from the New World, in, yeah, and this is, it's still extant installation, and actually the reason I worked on this material was because I could find an interesting link between my own family history and a herbalist, a woman who was not allowed to be a doctor but was working with this kind of knowledge that we often associate to, let's say, indigenous people, but of course in the Alps, we also have old ways of knowing nature, and there was, I argue, an interest at that moment obviously in collecting things like the penaccio. This is its current display in the Weltmuseum, or rather a photograph by Tal Adler of its new vitrine that it got, which is partly in a very strong argument for it's not being mobile, not being able to be repatriated, because it is too fragile, it is said, to move. However, this argument of fragility as well as it is held, you see a diagram of an aeroplane here in the center, which is part of the scientific report that was made by and commissioned from the museum and government during a binational research project to prove that it is too fragile to be transported, and it would need a 300 kilometer, no 300 meter long kilometer, it's so exaggerated, everything that is in these terms, aeroplane to kind of buffer the impact of takeoff and landing. But of course there are all sorts of technologies which counter vibrations, and I've spoken to the scientists also that work partly also from UNAM in Mexico City on this binational commission and did not agree with this very politicized outcome of the scientific report, and you see here some details of that. And you also see the ways in which this culture is still living through the concertos, through the dancers in Mexico City who also remake very much based on the codices that show us in detail how this feather work was made by the Amanteca, the feather workers in the Aztec Empire. You see them making exactly these kinds of sacred grounds, this is the backside, and it shows also the damage, especially through insects actually in the museum in Vienna to the feathers, and nevertheless it remains this extremely resplendent. But also in these kinds of macroscopic details one can see the conservation errors of the past, this was the early custodian of the crown who also had a strong intervention through a conservation treatment. Now this is the museum today, it on one hand quite ambivalently celebrates its imperial past with Sissy and you see in her sunglasses is reflected this crown of penaccio and it is deeply ingrained in the merchandise of the museum in its imperial shop. And this is my desk, there are all sorts of chocolates and I've been thinking about how, indeed, artists will use the museum space once things have been returned. And this includes performative works with a Nigerian Swiss group called the Agbons Mira and on the other hand, in which performatively Benin masks are recreated are performed are kind of performatively also stolen from the museum. These are the kinds of originals that we refer to and I will show perhaps just this short snippet from that film, or this performance rather. But the audience doesn't know the performance or what will happen exactly, although this is an actress that you see at the start. Are you aware that a large part of the collection in our museums comes from colonial looting? Yes. And do you think it's normal that this work is used? What is normal these days? These days. These days it's nothing. Sorry. I just want to help you. So please, so help me. Don't touch. Help us. You don't ask a thief if you can have your property back. Okay. So swaps have been stolen by the plunderers. The missionaries. The colonizers. And I'm not asking for reparation. No. Repair what? Repair who? Who? Who? Who? Who? Who? How? Who? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? Oh, so that's just the first few minutes of a film that I made as part of the team also contributing a sound installation to that performance you just saw. the museum, and especially on this topic of the penachal, where a group of activists replaced the audio guides in the museum with their own, well, with the voice of the protester who has been leading the protest movement to return this piece for over 30 years. I remember as a child seeing him protesting in Vienna. And so they did this, and the museum didn't notice that 50 new versions of their audio guide were circulating. They were quite careful not to steal the audio guides, but to just replace the headsets with the data and otherwise have the same audio guide except for the entry on the penachal. And then they filmed this and went viral on TikTok and now will become the subject of a feature film. Meet Chocanostitol, an activist who has been fighting for 40 years for Austria to give back to Mexico the sacred crown of Aztec emperor Moctezuma. The sacred crown was looted by Spaniards after Moctezuma's assassination 500 years ago and now resides at the Weltmuseum in Vienna, where visitors only hear the patronizing European version of the story that it was the feather crown of Moctezuma. This can't be true. Chocanostitol is the voice of Aztec descendants who had protested for years at the Weltmuseum and were silenced by Austrian authorities. But not anymore. We created 50 exact replicas with all the museum's original tracks, for change the audio of the Moctezuma's crowd exhibition with Chocanostitol's voice telling matrix. Then we hacked the audio guide system, introduced them in the museum and documented the reactions. We are in Vienna, tomorrow we're going into the museum. Let's do it. We will go into the museum, then we walk around normally, there we take our audio guide with our own recordings. In the exit, we leave those two audio guides in the basket. Austrian Parliament Member Petra Bayer heard the audio guide and decided to submit a motion to return the crown to Mexico. I plan to bring in another motion to parliament next week. This is the most significant step ever in the historical fight to return Moctezuma's crown. The cry of Moctezuma's descendants has finally been heard. Audio guides of the truth. So in the book I just launched, I was also tracing very much the history of all the artists and activists who have been involved. And these are pictures from those protests that I was saying taken by Liesl Ponger and other local artists. And there are within the kind of popular imagination already of this piece, as you see here with this marzipan confectionery which I've put next to just one of many images of a very violent suppression of the protests where people were really beaten and imprisoned for months and then deported from Austria for actually peacefully protesting outside the museum dancing. And this was in the 90s. So a lot of what I've been doing is discourse based as well as these more kind of counter-appropriative measures. And that is hosting, this is a long table, in the Maritime Museum in London where we invited, I had a fellowship there to deal with the Captain Cook commemoration and I used that funding to bring Pacific Islanders to the table here with the museum staff and the public and really discuss what it is we should be doing with this legacy. And then that turned again into a film which circulated in different formats around the world. I think I'm going to stop there and look forward very much to your questions. These are just close-ups of some of those tiny diagrams that I was showing you. And I'll finish here on the contemporary artist who lives in New York, Claudia Pena Salinas and a piece called Ketzali where she is also playing with the copy of the original of the penaccio. There's a copy in Mexico City and this is half-half and she has transposed them together in the De Paul Art Museum. I'd look really forward to discussing this further with you. Thank you. All right, that was Dr. Khadija Zinver von Karel. She has not yet joined us for the Q&A but she might still. So if you do have any questions for her please put it in the Q&A box. I hope she joins us because I would love to learn more about some of those daring and creative interventions in the museum. But now we have ample time for the Q&A. I see folks are using the Q&A box. I'm going to get us started because I did have a question for Damien. Damien, thank you so much for sharing your experiences working in Australia. And I was struck but not unsurprised with how many parallels there are to the situation for Indigenous cultural heritage workers both in the US and Canada. Just thinking about the low representation in the cultural heritage field and how the mainstream field has really disregarded First Nations work in putting together protocols. I know it took the Society of American Archivists at least 10 years to ratify the protocols in Native American materials. So one thing that I'm curious about are there cross-continental conversations happening between different First Nation Indigenous groups around strategies that have been successful, you know, different solidarity acts and movements happening? Yeah, excellent question. There are, and I've been involved in a few of them, but they tend to be facilitated by large peak bodies or conglomerates or institutions. So you're always very aware that you're, to bastardize the quote, but you're always very aware that you're in the master's house. And the funding available for community level knowledge, expertise, and people from the communities that are most impacted by this work or who have done this groundwork, they're almost never in these spaces. So myself, and there's a small number of us in Australia that are really kind of at the, really getting up in people's faces and grills about this kind of work. But we see each other at every single event, and it's up to us to act as that conduit between these communities and these spaces to actively translate in real time what is being said and try and make sure that that community perspective is prioritized. But as you can imagine, they'll probably know yourself. It can be very fraught and very exhausting work. So yeah, you see things like IFLA and there are special Indigenous groups, but the spots on those are not always reserved for First Nations Indigenous peoples and what gets lost in translation when you haven't lived or worked in these communities can be quite profound. Thank you. I'm going to ask you a follow-up question that came from the audience. How do you involve Indigenous library workers in the work of deep colonization and outreach, but also not overburden them when there are so few? Yeah, I wish my managers and directors had an answer for that question. I've grown to have a couple of times in my relatively short career. I suppose the first step is recognizing that that library work is a much broader term than we're comfortable with in a lot of our institutions and elder that is holding three generations of our histories and cultural protocols is an expert. We wouldn't refer to them as historian and we often wouldn't pay them as such. There's a thing that happened to hear that the burden of opportunity and every library, every archive, every space that wants to suddenly decolonize and recognize the importance of it creates an opportunity for First Nations voices to come in, but you know that you have to seize that moment then and then a lot of people hype you or they've got short-term project funding and so you end up spreading yourself very, very thin. For me it's about transparency of expectations and the limitations of what we're about to do and I will never pitch a project as healing or as transformative that may very well be a result that comes out of it, but it's very, very problematic to go in to these spaces and claim that you can you can heal a community. Often you do a little more damage before you get to that point and that's part of the process, payment. I will not speak to an elder or have any input from First Nations communities that are being paid. When I started here in New South Wales we immediately, it's about $130 an hour regardless of whether that's been fed into an exhibition where the work becomes something that's publicly seen setting that standard and recognizing that expertise the same way we live with an historian or a preservation expert no longer taking for granted the vast amounts of knowledge that have been given over and over again to these institutions and I suppose taking the work to community we spend a lot of time on the road in these communities taking the collections or the nearest copy we can and actually doing that work in people's kitchens while they're making dinner sitting and having a meal with people in scared of forcing people into an uncomfortable context and then expecting them to to recall knowledge systems that are connected to their families to the country to the rivers to the mountains and it's expensive work and you'll often be told that there are no resources but we have resources we just are prioritizing. Thanks. I have one more follow-up question for you. Speaking of centering Indigenous voices and expertise in the US there's a lot of conversation around the tool of Mercadu the content management system that centers Indigenous knowledge I'm curious if that's something that you use in your work and what kind of effect you've seen that has? Yeah so if you were currently using Looker 2 in our work to set up localised digital keeping places and so the library provides the infrastructure the hosting but has no access to the archive we provide training at those spaces that are built for the communities to store their own digital heritage and I've also previously used software called it's now called Keeping Culture which is a profound amazing software but very extensive and really out of the reach of most communities. The systems are very good they rely on a lot of work that taking place before you can get to the point where you can build and make public in any way a complex system that includes cultural permissions includes things like the traditional knowledge labels that Mercadu which are phenomenal they're amazing but we don't support the communities to get to that point and I've seen a lot of communities shortcut important cultural work in order to capitalise on being able to set up a keeping place and a keeping place as I mentioned before digitisation things that they're farming in from other institutions come loaded with all of that colonial baggage and that work to unpack that yeah it's very important to set up spaces cultural interplay theories that I think they already did 20 years ago which talks about this third space between these two cultures which has to be rough and square that conversation that contested history can happen but that has to be a flexible space and you have to be ready to have that conversation so we're focusing a lot more on digitising the equipment the training and support that needs to happen to get to that point and recognising that setting up a digital archive shouldn't be the end point and definitely shouldn't be the start point it's part of that conversation but it is wonderful software it's really good to see that more institutions are looking at it I'm worried that they look at that and are racing towards that and hoping that it will cancel out some of the very difficult work that needs to happen before that yeah thank you for for granting how much time it takes to build these systems and you know it's not an end point but it's really part of the conversation I think a lot of institutions try to rush that process in order to say that they are working on a type of project like that and it becomes very performative and really defeats the purpose of working with communities so I'm going to switch gears and ask a question of Layla this seems to have come up in other panel discussions so it would be great to hear your thoughts on what is the definition of what constitutes sale under duress the Nazi World War II context seems pretty clear but what about other conflict or refugee situations interestingly I don't think it is clear with Nazi Lutheran art either there have been a number of cases within the past couple of years that have brought up this the issue of whether or not a sale was under duress but all these cases have been dismissed under other grounds so I mentioned the case of Philip versus Germany and that was dismissed due to like jurisdictional issues and the court never made a determination about whether the sale was under duress they never determined you know that there was kind of this checklist that you know just because a work sold for under its market value does not necessarily mean it's duress and I think there have been people in the legal field that want to see a clear answer from the court similarly there was another case dismissed within the past few years that also involved duress it was a work that was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and again that case was dismissed early on so the court never addressed what it means for a sale to be under duress I think there's some you know some very clear cases that have been decided but there's not really a specific guideline and I know there haven't really been cases and I think it's a really good question because there haven't really been cases outside the context of non-stiluted art where ownership has been questioned due to this like forced sale or duress sale it would be nice to see a case like that come forward but again like with the law there are a few hurdles you need to get over first and part of the problem with some of these cases is that these cakings these thefts occurred long ago so when we're talking about thefts from the past many of them were decades ago so you would need to get over the hurdle of a statute of limitations or even that question it's something I vaguely alluded to or like briefly alluded to um who has standing so if it's something that was taken from a community who has standing within that community um so I think that's another challenge facing indigenous communities and other communities outside of you know a sovereign nation we see nations that are defined by certain borders and are recognized as a sovereign state bringing cases or you know filing cases but I think it's a little more challenging for non-nation state communities or groups so thinking about gray area and also reflecting my idea about how there really is no legal framework for this type of work in Australia um what are some alternative forms of approaching or resolving cultural heritage disputes that you've seen have been successful apart from these legal based approaches yeah so I think the past couple years are they give me some reason for optimism because I think different stakeholders are engaging in discussions and just calling out the behavior of museums in the past and I think it's encouraging and there's much more that needs to be done but I think it's encouraging that there are museums in the US I think with the NFA in Boston that has agreed to return some of the Benin bronzes same thing in the UK there have been a couple of British institutions I know Germany has committed to returning objects so I think there is a movement and I don't know if it's possible to you know to write all these wrongs and to return all these objects but I think it's really positive that there is some movement on that front and I think there's a role for the press to play for the public to play for donors um I mean kind a little bit unrelated but still you know kind of tangential to this discussion we see institutions removing names of controversial donors like the name of the Sackler family they received such bad media attention for you know their role in the opioid crisis and it's incredible that now museums around the world French museums I think the Lou the British Museum the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York I believe one of the Smithsonian museums have removed the Sackler name from its walls from their walls I think that's really a positive sign and I hope that kind of public pressure encourages institutions to do the same thing and to make amends to other communities and you know move outside of just the law and look at ethics as well thank you we do have a follow-up question for you about the bust case that you mentioned earlier has there been research into where the bust was before it came to Germany and how it came to be there has that been a part of the story? A lot of people are questioning that whether you've seen this comment a lot about why the bust wasn't returned to Italy because it was Roman but we don't know where it came and you know the Roman Empire doesn't mean Italy you know we're not by saying it's Roman doesn't necessarily mean it came from the modern nation of Italy and it was removed wherever it was removed from it was acquired by a German Bavarian king prior to the establishment of the Republic of Italy so I don't think the Republic of Italy has any claims in fact I represent the government of Italy in an antiquities case and I can't imagine Italy is going to make a claim for the work so it was acquired by a Bavarian king and he had it as early as 1833 which predates Italy's patrimony laws so it's not going back to Italy it's going back to Germany I think all the stakeholders are happy with that solution. Thank you. I had a follow-up question so you talked a lot about cases that deal with antiquities I'm wondering if you can speak to any cases that deal with more contemporary cultural heritage I mean 17, 18, 19, 20th century and if there are any difference in dealing with repatriation for antiquities versus more contemporary materials? So when I talk about patrimony laws we have to look at the definition is in each nation so every nation has a different type of patrimony law or you know they they protect different types of materials and different materials of different ages so contemporary materials generally aren't covered under those laws because in a minimum when cultural heritage is defined it's defined as being over a certain age so I don't really see contemporary materials being covered as frequently although there are laws in New York so think about Pablo Picasso some of his works are over a hundred years and some of these patrimony laws in Europe will cover works by Picasso or works by other 20th century artists and these are becoming controversial and that's a whole other kind of question is to who gets to define that as their heritage so a country like France where you know Picasso is Spanish a country like France has denied the right of owners to sell their works outside of France to export their works out of France so there's some controversy there as well as how do we define heritage who gets to define it and I think that's actually a really important issue to look at as to who's defining heritage should it be just based upon age does it have something to do with like the nationality of the artist and should that be a consideration it seems funny for me to be asking that as someone in the US where you know it's we're such a melting pot so I think these are really difficult questions of how do we define heritage and how do we value heritage it goes back to that question of what do we value enough to protect thank you so much I see that Khadija just joined us um hi Khadija welcome I hope your other event went well yes can you hear me sorry I'm actually still out but I wanted to log in as I'm on my way home and say yes I'm here for questions to listen mostly probably for the next 10 minutes but yeah excellent um well I would love to ask you a question because I really enjoyed your presentation and hearing about different interventions I'm curious if you could say more about how the public responded when they engaged with the audio guides that were replaced and if and how you think that changed the public dialogue around this issue of repatriation I mean I know the parliament member has made the move made the motion to return it but I'm curious what you see in public discourse yeah I mean so I've just been part of a big public discourse that's why I haven't been with you live and I noticed that there is a an increased interest here in what artistic voices what questions they might ask and how they might ask those differently how there's a kind of a simplicity but still a great kind of future oriented vision that came with that intervention and um there were quite a few people just now in the audience here live uh who were from the government and who are kind of asking yeah very pragmatic questions now so I think it's really shifted the discourse from wondering like what might the ethics of it be to just actually practically and the other thing that stands in that in the way of that is really this scientific technical question how to transport in that case the answer so that's been an interesting shift but actually the efforts have been resolved it feels like maybe not through that intervention alone but through the differences that we've been discussing over the past two days thank you for sharing um your audio is cutting out a little bit so um before I okay and to the audience please take advantage of the fact that Khadija has joined us and put your questions in Q&A box um in the meantime we do have another question for Damian um how can you address issues with indigenous items held in private museums ah private museums um any without concerning outviolates and theft uh it's a tricky one um it's very hard to know what's in private collections and some of the issues that uh our other speakers have mentioned and the stipulations on how those can be viewed or borrowed at least are not accessible to the general public level um First Nations communities that live hundreds of kilometers away and don't know that it's there interestingly one of the tactics I use is um is kind of infiltrating so um staff that I've worked with First Nations staff that I've worked with and trained up to become curators um a few of those have actually gone to work in these museum spaces and are taken with them if you want to detail I tend to radicalize the people a little bit they're taking that with them and there is now somebody within the institution um to to address some of those problems awareness raising I mean you don't get very far if you trigger um white fragility or a sense of shame around that even if that you know private museum knows that what they have is stolen and knows that the families that they rented it um did so illegally um it is not a productive way to do it um but we have found some success also in leveraging our strengths as a you know premier collecting institution and we can borrow things and all of this is to set up for long-term loans to be for exhibition but I've had some success in securing long-term loans not for exhibition so these could be sat in a room with the descendants that I can find funding to bring people in to sit with these objects to have some semblance of that control to to return stories to sing to these items to sit with something that was with their old people um which is nowhere near repatriation but is a step on that in that journey and when those dinos and the private curators and museums and collectors see that and sense the importance of these items in these collections to the other people it can really trigger that conversation towards moving into a into a term of repatriation I think that's um a great point to transition into this question that's very broad um and I think everyone might be able to respond to this what do museums of the future look like tough question I would think that I think we're moving into new institutions that are more inclusive that are curated hopefully more responsibly I think that museum boards are becoming at least in the US things are becoming a little more diverse or intending to and I think with more diverse boards with more representative boards and employees it's possible to curate in a more um accurate more respectful way and I think that will also be reflected in what museums um acquire as well perhaps be more diligent and perhaps try to include a more you know representative collection whether you know not just race or ethnicity but genders you know sexual preference you know I think museums are trying to do that and I hope they have success and I think I think we should reflect on where you know where they were 30 or 40 years ago and I think there has been progress but there's still a lot to be done so hopefully within the next couple of decades we can see more representative collections and kind of makeup Damien or Khadija would you like to respond to the question of what do museums of the future look like? Sure um I mean as you can probably tell I can talk forever um I'm definitely more of a librarian but I think the same principles apply uh these spaces need to be open and critical um and we need to be encouraging the kinds of conversations that we've seen um today and let me know what's happening on the fringes and I want to see these museums taking those risks um so that the the safety of these projects and this radical work isn't always a risk taken by communities whether those impersonations queer and women in a lot of these spaces aren't taking that risk on the institution can relate that risk and as the institution's much more and much more reserved and they're not going anywhere um for better or for worse um I think we need to just stop thinking about our spaces as static structures and think about the most places where conversations can happen there's a lot really exciting stuff with creative fellowships creative engagement historical collections can cover often uh interrogate trauma without having to be trauma-formed without having to just trot out another dozen pictures of mission broken personations people and instead can be vibrant color for reflection and I think we're seeing a shift towards that which I'm very excited about thanks Khadija would you like to add anything um yeah the future of museums I mean one can offer there's a spectrum of responses and and there's also a radical kind of dissolution of the museum that might need to happen because to be honest like there's a pathology within them about keeping and the people who are kind of keeping and and become uh almost like um I mean they're guardians of this material but but in European museums where I work there's a there's a lack of access and and kind of sense of um public due diligence which I think actually needs some quite radical change and um there are some cultures obviously that feel like their ancestors are are good as as ambassadors and as kind of ways of keeping a relationship with the future museum but I think these institutions are so deeply imperial and so um there's so much structural racism within them that uh you know the kinds of change that it's true has happened over the last 30 years um I'm not sure that we can get to a place with the current kind of imperial museum structure that we we want to get to in the future I think that there's going to need to be um yeah a way in which also objects move like quite far outside and that's what curatorially is happening a lot we're using public space we're kind of traveling exhibitions outside of these um museum institutions so I don't know just to offer another perspective from someone who doesn't work within them but rather against them I think um yeah I think they're not really serving the people that that are the stakeholders really well I think this is a great great point to conclude the conversation thank you all so much for participating in this panel and thank you to everyone who attended um Jade is there are there any last words you'd like to share yeah so I just want to thank all the panelists and tk for moderating it's been such a great program and thank you all for attending this program and if you've attended other programs too and this is the last of our program and so please do fill out the survey because we do want to know um we're open to ideas as to how we should proceed in continuing this conversation and so um do do that and if you haven't checked out our digital exhibit there's a link to it from our guide and um again thank you for coming have a great rest of your day and evening wherever you are and keep in touch bye