 Good morning everyone, apologies for the late start. We were having a little bit of a technical difficulties. So welcome to our symposium, Contested Collections, grappling with history and forging pathways for repatriation. This morning is the second of our four programs and it's called Intangled Collections, Colonial Histories and the Ethics of Ownership and Stewardship. My name is Jadal Burrow. I'm the Librarian Curator for Southeast Asian Studies and Pacific Island Studies at UCLA and one of the colleagues for the planning team for this symposium. So let us now begin the proceedings with a welcome video from Virginia Steele, the UCLA Norman and Armina 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 Armina 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 Gabrielle Leno-Tonba 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 belonged 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 Elena Ising, Dana Laderer, and Yesenia 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, Ginny, for that welcome. And now it is my great pleasure to introduce you to our moderator, Dr. Susan Slimovich. Susan Slimovich is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Her latest publication is Race, Trace and Place, Essays in Honor of Patrick Wolfe, of which he's a co-editor. Her research interests focusing on the Middle East and North Africa are concerned with reparations, truth commissions, economic anthropology, human rights, visual anthropology, preservation and heritage. Her current research project is on French colonial statues, monuments and heritage in Algeria. Everyone, welcome Dr. Slimovich. Thank you very much, Jade. And thank you for inviting me to be part of this remarkable symposium. It's also my pleasure to introduce our three speakers for the second of four sessions, spread across three days, organized by the UCLA library on the occasion of their restituting Nazi looted books to the Prague Jewish Museum, currently here in the collection. The symposium contested collections as its second session, the topic of entangled collections, colonial histories and the ethics of ownership and stewardship, we're featuring three speakers who provide an overview of the global history of colonialism and its outsized role in the development of cultural heritage collections in Euro-American spaces. The examples by the speakers about repatriation to Africa and Southeast Asia, Watson museums in Europe, all open discussions about the ethics of stewardship, varying legal regimes of artifacts as property, the struggle by formerly colonized countries to reclaim their heritage and what constitutes full restitution. It's a pleasure to introduce our first speaker, Alice Proctor, an art historian and writer working on colonial memory in museums. She is the author of the recent publication entitled The Whole Picture, the Colonial Story of the Art in our Museums and Why We Need to Talk About It. She also ran the Uncomfortable Art Tours Project from 2017 to 2020. Thank you, Alice Proctor and we look forward to hearing from you. Thank you so much. Hi everyone, I'm really thrilled to be here and thank you for having me. I don't actually have any images to share today, mostly because of my own ongoing technical difficulties, but I wanted to talk to you a little bit today about the work that I've been doing for the past few years and the places that I've seen the conversations around memory and restitution and power go in museums. So for some context, I am settler Australian. I was born on what is Gadigal land in Australia, but I live in London at the moment and I'm mostly based in the UK. One of the reasons that my bio is a little bit thin is that I am about to start a PhD project and so there's not much to say about me at the moment, but for the last three years, I've lost five years, I've been working on the Uncomfortable Art Tours. So my background is in art history and visual and material culture and I've been working as an educator with school children and university groups in museums. And I brought the research that I had and the work that I've been doing around colonial storytelling, memory, narratives around repatriation and restitution and turned them into tours for adult audiences. So the idea was that I could bring groups into galleries and talk about the kind of contested histories and narratives of imperialism on display that were not necessarily immediately obvious and that in many cases, the museums and institutions themselves were actively avoiding and shutting down. I was able to do this because in the UK I had access to free public galleries and being in London, it was immediately kind of available to work with so many objects that connected to colonial history. It was interesting to me from the beginning how many people didn't recognize that this was something that might be sort of worth doing or worth time. And I would say that although there is a huge amount of work and scholarship around repatriation and restitution and the representation of colonial history and museums, the kind of public scrutiny around that scholarship has dramatically increased in the last decade. I do genuinely think, at least in my experience in the UK, the sort of public conversations that we're now having in the media around repatriation would not have been possible five years ago, 10 years ago. And the level of awareness has dramatically increased. That's not to say that the work has necessarily accelerated, although I do think it's under greater scrutiny, but there has been a change in the way that this conversation is happening. So a lot of the work that I've been doing has been object-led storytelling. With tour groups, I go into museum spaces and I look at what's already on display as a educator who doesn't work for or necessarily with these institutions. There's a limit to what I can do with the objects in the collections. If something's not on display, if there's not sort of information and access and sort of official availability, it's very difficult to tell stories with those objects. My intention was always to use what was already on show, use what was already accessible and available and try and bring the stories of repatriation, restitution, contested heritage to a public audience who didn't necessarily have a scholarly background and in many cases, hadn't even visited these museums before. So with my tours, the aim was more than anything to tell stories. And obviously that had to be based in research, but it was incredibly important to me that these became conversational spaces. I worked very hard to find a way of maintaining a kind of empathetic and considerate atmosphere for the attendees on my tours. Everyone approaching these conversations is coming from a different point of proximity. And it very quickly became clear that there were people who had really never thought about their connection to colonial history before, hadn't even occurred to them that they might be living with its consequences. Meanwhile, there were other people who felt it very immediately, felt it in their own families and in their own lifetimes. And so establishing a kind of base level firstly of information, but also of emotional literacy for the groups was incredibly important. A lot of the work I've done since then has been with educators. I've focused a lot on the way that we tell stories in museums spaces specifically in order to try and facilitate a more empathetic conversation. So for example, I have a No Devils Advocate rule on my tours. It's important that we're very conversational and we think about the ways that people engage with this history, but at the same time, if I think you're picking a fight for the sake of it, that will be shut down. Asking questions and engaging sort of open and considerate discussion is very different from the kind of combative language that some people would try and use on tours. And as part of that, it was very important to try and make space for emotional responses. If you are taking a group on a tour of a museum and you don't know the backgrounds of all of those people in your group and you've never met them before, it's not possible to predict what people will have an emotional response to. And I think that many educators and people working in this kind of field might have had the experience of someone in a tour group becoming quite intensely emotional around an object that isn't necessarily the one that you would have predicted, but making it clear that these are narratives that have a very human impact has been an incredibly important process. So with that said, one of the things that I've been trying to move towards in my work as an educator and as a tour guide is a different way of training staff in galleries. I am able to do what I do because I come in as an outsider. And again, I'm very much working in museums and art galleries in the UK. And I think many of you will have also had this experience. The people doing the front of house roles are overwhelmingly volunteers or docents. They're overwhelmingly underpaid, under trained, incredibly knowledgeable, incredibly skilled at what they do but not necessarily the people who receive the most support from the institutions in which they work. There are obviously exceptions to that role, but overwhelmingly the front of house staff in museums here in the UK are either paid security guards who don't have a relationship with the collections because they haven't been encouraged to or they're volunteers. So part of the empathy of the space has to be towards the people on the front line of the institution. But I've also found in the work that I have done in a more collaborative way with museums that often there's a total lack of training in terms of how to handle these very difficult and sensitive conversations. When we talk about repatriation and restitution, I think it is incredibly important to have lofty goals. And when we talk about contested heritage, we have to keep the kind of ultimate end goal of repatriation in mind. At the same time, it's really important to recognize that restitution is a process. And along the way, there will be stages of conversation, of discourse, of research. And you have to empower your gallery staff to handle them. So often I've seen the researchers and the curators who are responsible for these projects as completely disconnected from the actual kind of museum front lines. And when you don't have a kind of narrative and conversation moving between those spaces, that information is not making it out to the public. I've worked with institutions in a more official capacity now and something I've seen happen again and again is that the museum will say, well, we're doing research on this, but we don't really wanna share it until we're certain. And we're starting to think about the provenance, but we don't wanna give people incorrect information. So we're just gonna sit on it until we know absolutely for sure what's happening here. And I understand that instinct. It's an instinct of self-preservation and particularly one to protect yourself from an often very hostile news media that has very much taken against repatriation and restitution as a goal. But within that, I think making room for uncertainty and recognizing that clarity is very rare when we're talking about these objects is so important. Many of the pieces that I work with in museum collections have immediate and obvious traceable histories of violence in their legacies. We can immediately look at some of these pieces and know where they came from, how they came to be here, who made them, and how that history has been violated. There are other objects where we will never know that and those pieces might not necessarily be sought for repatriation, but they are still part of this conversation of moving towards restitution. The way that we engage with uncertain objects, sort of precarious objects, things like tourist art, which I often use in my work, which has been, for example, produced by an indigenous community specifically for trade with European settlers, that's an incredibly important object to understanding the development of these power relations. And those objects have to be considered and understood alongside the objects that are sought for repatriation. We have to think about the way that material histories have been negotiated over time. I'm very much in favor of repatriation and I'm very much in favor of the kind of rigorous provenance histories and research that leads to that. But I would like to caution people who work in museums and heritage spaces against reaching for absolute certainty and instead find ways of working with this ambiguity and uncertainty. Your instincts might be very good about when an object does require more research into repatriation and things like that, but you also need to make room for the fact that sometimes these stories are not immediately obvious and it won't necessarily be clear until you begin to think about them and think about the way that they've been understood by your audiences, what to do with them. I would say, sort of to round this thought off, I think that questioning authority within museums and historical collections is actually an act of care towards the objects that we hold. The idea of uncertainty and instability can be really frightening for those of us who are working in heritage and conservation and things like that. But best practice and most knowledge and most kind of perfect information is always a moving target. I think we can learn a lot from the way that many science and technology museums are having to be incredibly flexible and adapt their information and displays and research constantly. This is obviously a generalization, but I've seen a real reluctance in the institutions that I've worked with and against and for here in the UK to engage with uncertainty. Finding the kind of unfixedness of these narratives is incredibly important. Colonial histories of violence, histories of trauma, histories of settler colonialism, invasion and genocide are stories that have been very deliberately silenced, erased, denied. And the consequence of that is that it's often incredibly difficult to find certainty within them. Approaching them with as much empathy as possible and as much consideration for what might be or might be possible or plausible can be a really important step. This isn't against research. This isn't against scholarship. It's alongside the kind of material care and conservation work and provenance work that has to happen. But if that work is happening entirely behind the scenes and it's not available to your general audiences and your visitors and your staff, then in many cases it might as well not be happening. If you're not facilitating your front of house staff, your volunteers, your educators to talk about these contested histories, then the visitors to your museums are met with a blank wall. And if your guides and educators shut down every conversation about colonial history before it even begins, I can understand why that might make you feel safer in terms of not wanting to put out information that you're not certain about. But it really does make you look like you have something to hide. And although more and more museums here in the UK are being open about the fact that they're researching their collections, that research in progress is often still obscured. And that's not something that increases trust. It's not something that increases goodwill. If anything, it feels like a delaying tactic. And obviously I'm speaking about this as someone who works as an educator and is in a kind of ambiguous space of insider and outsider within the museum sector. But yeah, I say all of this with a lot of love and a lot of care towards the people I know who work in museums and who deal with these things every day. But ultimately I think the care that we have and the duty of care that we have towards audiences and to the objects in these collections is more important than the anxiety that a researcher might feel about sharing their work before it's complete. I wanted to offer that to you as a bit of a starting point and kind of a provocation more than anything else. But thank you for inviting me to be here. And I'm really looking forward to our conversation later on. Thank you very much, Alice Proctor. Our next speaker is Dr. Ndubisi Azilumba. He was actually the Francoise Billion Richardson curator of African art at the New Orleans Museum of Art until last week. He holds a PhD in art history from the University of Florida, Gainesville and specializes in the visual cultures of Alican shrines. While at the University of Florida, he served as a research assistant at the Harn Museum of Art and worked on the exhibition entitled Congo Across the Waters. He was also the Andrew W. Mellon Research Specialist in African art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for a project to study the museum's African collection. He's active in conversations on repatriating African cultural patrimony, delivering lectures, contributing book chapters and articles on the topic. Next week, and please accept our congratulations, he returns as the African curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Welcome, Dr. Azilumba. Thank you very much. Can I start with the next slide, please? I always start my presentation putting out the slide. That little gray patch in that map is Benin Kingdom. I will not forget to point at the historical incident that resulted to the looting of Benin art in 1897, although this is not a historical talk, but I think putting those little stories as part of our conversation will help create a clearer picture about what we are trying to address. Next slide, please. The British government acting upon requests from the Royal Niger Company to remove the Benin King, who was seen as an obstacle to trade. In February 1897, the British force of about 1200 men supported by several hundreds African auxiliaries besieged Benin city. The raid, which in the literature sometimes is called the British Cunitive Expedition, was carried out on Benin, and they bombarded Benin city for three days from the seaport of Fugotun. They touched the city and looted 500 years worth of bronze, of bronzes, brass, and ivory sculptures. As you can see from that slides, these were treasures that constituted the Royal Archives of Benin Kingdom. The king at the time of Balvarawen, who ruled between 1888 to 1914, was deposed and sent to die in exile in the southeastern part of Nigeria. And then the British incorporated Benin city into the colonial nation of Nigeria. I'm gonna talk a little bit about Benin art. So starting from this slide, during its glorious period from the 13th to the 19th century, Benin produced one of the continent's most sophisticated artistic legacies. To reflect the splendor of the Royal Court, the king, or they call them the obvests, commissioned highly skilled artisans to create rare beautiful works of cast brass and carved ivories, can I see the next slide? This included human and animal forms. There were also relief plaques, elephant thoughts, tusks, pendants, bracelets, life-sized commemorative heads, and queen modus, and ceremonial objects to adorn royal palace and altars. Flip through more of the slides, to show you the range of what Benin, yeah, stop at this slide. So, you know, characteristically, Benin art was created first and foremost, just the king. And he's elaborate court because the king of Benin was looked upon as the representative of the spirits on it. So every artwork created using precious materials were reserved for him. It was his own prerogative, or it is some decision to share those objects to other highly placed individuals in society. And he also can gift them out to people he chooses at various points in time. Benin art was a royal art and dedicated to the service of the king and the complex rituals that compliment his status in society, even though the art can be looked as religious art, it was normally royal in his general makeup, because the material used for his creation. In the past, Brazz and Ivory, where the exclusively reserve of the king, he determined who could have access to this object. And due to these characteristics, it was no wonder that my late friend Joseph Neva-Domsky states that the technical virtuosity and the artistic excellence of Benin art astonished then puzzled European curators when they first came in contact with them immediately after 1897. And what Joseph was pointing out here was that immediately after the raid of Benin in 1897, a lot of Benin art were stolen and taken to England. And from England, it was sold around Europe and eventually came to America. So, you see the network of dissemination of this stolen object, it traveled from the location where it got to after the raid and then it spread up to America. And that brings me to the next slide to repatriate, to return, to bring things back. That is what I think within this slide, I framed my conversation about the three arrows. And the three arrows to me is to repatriate, to restitute and to repel it. No doubt that the conversation about repatriation of cultural patrimony of Africa reaches on while the extraction and deprivation of cultural heritage and cultural property consents the generation who participates in plundering as well as those who must suffer through extraction. It also becomes inscribed throughout the long duration of societies, conditioning the flourishing of certain societies while simultaneously continuing to weaken us. Repatriation effort are commendable and important activities which are carried out for the continuous reminder of indigenous peoples' artifacts in someone else's possession. It helps to cast light on the history and cultural relevance of these objects. By engaging with such debates, the essence of its importance will unfold. And we can begin to implement concrete action towards the repatriation of the cultural property of Africa, especially those looted from the new kingdom, which is the focus of my talk this morning. My idea about repatriation have actually engineered a lot of reactions. Sometimes people confuse my perspective to mean that I am caving in about not wanting the objects to go back. But I started my idea of repatriation with sense to take on the conversation even much more meticulously and sensibly. I use those two words because repatriation conversation is not happening only since the fall of the winter of 2017 when Iman and Macron made a declaration at a university at Ouagadougou. Repatriation conversation has actually started in mid-20th century. And every effort at African repatriation has actually just like Alice was talking about now has actually kind of whittled away because of the way it has been handled. But I think in 2017, when Iman and Macron made a declaration, the status of the individual are making the declaration actually created the oath that the conversation needed to move forward and haven't moved forward. And he actually matched his word with action by commissioning two scholars, one, Benedict Savoia and a fellow in Sa'a. So commissioning them to actually walk out modalities for repatriation to work. So my application of repatriation with sense latches on this idea of the renewed interest on repatriation conversation and then declare that first and foremost, objects need to return. But you now ask me, do we really have to do physical return sometimes? In a recent conversation with Professor Dan Hicks of the Oxford University who also stewarded the Petrivers Museum in the United Kingdom, we have looked at it even much more deeply. Repatriation could be admission of guilt. Admission of guilt can actually be the starting point of healing. And then my application of repatriation with sense comes with a whole new package of relationship building. If your ancestors stole my stuff and then we have now come to this point where we are rational enough to speak about it, if I get the admission from you and then we can then form a new network of relationship to like walk with this material because first and foremost, the work of art was created for mankind's enjoyment. And then angrily or irrationally taking it away and bringing it back and keeping it back may not solve the larger problem or may not be helpful in the long run if we are going to enjoy this object. So my advocacy for repatriate with sense has advocated for what I have termed human infrastructure development. What I mean by that is that Western institution that has held this object until now should be bold enough to bring about ideas and programs that will bring folks from the continent to come and understudy or learn how to steward this object because museum in the first place are Western invention. Not that Africans don't have a museum ideology, but just that for them to have variety to help modify their museum ideology, the human infrastructure development becomes very important. I always use a story to buttress this point. When I started out field research at the beginning in 2005 and six, I had returned to Benin City to do some field work research and I went into the National Museum that was located at the heart of the city. I have been there for two days trying to find a kaiva material to work with. I couldn't find. And as I was about leaving the second day, I was approached by Janitor on my way out. He obviously saw that I have been there for two days and I was very angry. I couldn't find nothing. And he stopped me and said, hey, do you want an old map of Benin Kingdom? My face lit up. I was so excited. I wanted to see that map because how could I have been here for two days? I couldn't find nothing. And I said, yes, let's go back and you go show me. And I said, we're not going back. I have them at home. I can bring them tomorrow if you are gonna come out here and pay for them. This is one of the people who are supposed to be museum workers, who are supposed to educate people about what happened to the museum. I take that as a casing point. That guy probably never got the right training and did not understand the importance of these cultural materials that is kept under his care. So if we invest in human infrastructural development coupled with this big news, this big story in the news about a new museum that is being conceived for Benin City, I believe that it will actually end in a win-win type situation whereby museums in America, I'm not gonna refer to my colleagues in Europe, will be active participant in the development of museum activities in the continent by creating shows that potentially could show in the continent. And also exchange ideas with this same other institution. If we can hack into that idea and create those network of relationships, I strongly feel that most of our clamor for repatriation will be abated because a lot will be gained from both sides. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Azailumba. Our next speaker is Panga Ardiancia. He is a PhD candidate in the history of art and archeology at SOAS University of London. He focuses on the afterlives and knowledge production of Hindu-Buddhist materials in Indonesia, which then brought him to colonial collecting practices and object restitution, as well as the historiography of modern Indonesia. He recently co-edited a book entitled Returning Southeast Asia's Past, Objects, Museums and Restitutions, and he also has published blog posts, one of them object repatriation and knowledge co-production for India's cultural artifacts. His presentation is recorded because he's conducting field research with possible connectivity problems, and if internet connections permit, he will join us in person and participate in the discussion. Hello, everyone. My name is Panga, and in these presentations, I will be talking about Jukjakartan manuscripts from Indonesia and their entangled steward ships. First of all, I would like to thank UCLA Library for the invitations, and I feel really privileged to be able to speak in these sessions to discuss my perspectives on issues related to contested collection and object restitutions. In these presentations, I would argue for the kinds of steward ships that could be engendered by repatriation process upon mutual understanding. So, for our discussions, the story originates in the island of Java at the Palace of Jukjakartan. As you can see from the slides, which is in the central part of the Java island. The palace was founded in 1755 following an agreement negotiated by the dead East in this company to pacify in the power struggle happening at the time in Java. In this historical context, the manuscript production for palaces in Java, particularly in the central part of Java, was important part of court traditions in legitimizing the current rulers, both by providing royal genealogies with supposed supreme mythical power and by projecting the rulers' as custodians of culture. Due to the climate condition, however, the manuscripts at the time were preserved to copying and rewriting. And this would be confused with the literary value of the manuscript as well because some stories are claimed to happen several decades before. And it is also not uncommon to have new manuscripts, copies composed from different texts tied together into a new historical narrative. So in the early 19th century, the island of Java was a colony under the Dutch authority. However, due to the Napoleonic War, the Dutch was annexed and absolved under the rule of the French Empire in 1810. Worry about the threat that might be posted by the French in the Far East region, Thomas Stamford Refluse from the British East India Company successfully made a case to capture Java with the British force was able to oust the Dutch rule from the island on September 1811. The British colonial administration over the island was short lifted, however, with Java written fully to the control of the Netherlands by 1816 following the end of the Anglo-French War. But the British Interagnum has enduring legacies until today. During the Interagnum, Refluse as the Lieutenant-Governor-General become the de facto administrator of Java at the time, and he demanded full submission from the local rulers. However, the Sultan of Jogja-Karta Palace continued to defy Refluse expectations to what the Sultan demanded was merely to be respected as a counterpart to the previous authority. Due to a series of missed understanding, Refluse finally decided to storm the Palace of Jogja-Karta in the morning of 20th of June 1812. This event is still being remembered in local memory by the name of Geiger Spehe or the Space Havoc. With Spehe refers to the Indian Sepoy Infantry contracted by the British as their main force in Java. The Palace of Jogja-Karta was ransacked at the time and many valuables were taken as war loot. One interesting thing is that manuscripts were also collected, particularly by these three peoples, the Thomas Stamford Refluse, John Craveford, the resident of Jogja-Karta, and Colin MacKenzie, the chief engineer of British army in Java. Not limited to these three peoples, but these three were the biggest collectors at the time. They collected the manuscript under the assumption that the manuscript would give them knowledge on the culture and history of Java. However, Refluse and Craveford would soon be disappointed when they concluded that the manuscripts were less historical account and more of the treasure of value according to them. Until today, we have not known how many manuscripts were taken at the time, and probably some less beautiful and presumed to be less important manuscripts might be sought after the ransacking as well to the local people outside the palace. However, 75 manuscripts were identified in the British library, particularly during the production of a catalogue on the Indonesian manuscript in Great Pitain. Following the visit of the palace of Jogja-Karta in 2017, the manuscript were finally digitized to the funding from Mr. S.P. Lohia, whose foundation concerned with rare manuscripts. By 2019, the digital copies for all the manuscripts in the British library are already made freely and fully accessible in the British library website. This is the important part of the afterlife of the manuscript from Jogja-Karta that currently some of the most beautiful manuscripts are being displayed in the permanent gallery in the British library called the Treasure of the British Library Exhibitions. And it's also worth reading the caption aloud for us to couch the what is happening at this exhibition as well. So the caption reads the British library holds a rich collection of Japanese manuscripts. This includes work on history, ethics, Islamic practice and law, and a literature primarily written in force, as well as archival documents and letters. Manuscripts are written on European paper or luang, a Japanese paper made from written triba. Some books are beautifully illuminated in colors and gold and illustrated with figures influenced by the angular shape of poyang-kuri puppets from the Saddo theater, the pinnacle of Japanese art forms. On display here are five manuscripts from the Royal Library of Jogja-Karta in Central Java, acquired after and tagged by British forces in June 1812. With general support of Mr. Espelio here, 75 Japanese manuscripts from Jogja-Karta have recently been digitized and are now freely accessible online. So from reading descriptions, we know that these manuscripts in the British library are being valued as art objects and also as knowledge depository. We also should acknowledge that the British Library acknowledged the colonial violence that happens on the back of the acquisition of this manuscript as well, though not so much used the word Lutz in the captions, but still it is a sober self-assessment from the British Library. And we should acknowledge that as well. Also happening in 2019, the Palace of Jogja-Karta held an international seminar to celebrate the crowning anniversary of the current Sultan, Annabel Gallop, the lead curator of Southeast Asian Manuscript in the British Library was invited. And during the seminars, she noted that there were already papers presented using digitally accessible manuscripts from the British Library websites, meaning that the sort of digital reputation of the manuscripts is already reaping rewards. By opening up and democratizing access to the production of knowledge, meaning that people doesn't have to go to London physically to access the manuscripts, but they can do it from Indonesia or from other part of the world as well. And at the event as well in the conjunction with the International Seminar, the then British Ambassador to Indonesia, Muwaza Malik, handed over the digital master copies of the Jogja-Karta Manuscript from the British Library to the current Sultan of Jogja-Karta. And this handover event in Indonesia was being celebrated as by the Indonesian media being celebrated as the return of quote missing link unquote, which were gone for more than 200 years. And it is hoped that the return manuscript would be reproduced and our hope to generate new knowledge as inspired by the Palace of Jogja-Karta. So from here, all seems well and proper. Nonetheless, there are still some voices that request that the physical manuscript should be written as well since there are Pusaka for the Palace of Jogja-Karta. So the reasoning is that this manuscript are considered as Pusaka for the Palace. So next one then, what is Pusaka? The word Pusaka is widely used in Malay and Japanese languages. And in the context of Japanese cultures where the Palace of Jogja-Karta located, Pusaka ultimately refers to the rules, authority, and power. Pusaka has a more pronounced in attachments to the ruler in the sense the communal value of Pusaka derives from the functions and sacred duty of the rulers owing the Pusaka to hold the world together, not to descend into chaos. The holders of Pusaka is said to be divinely chosen. Those projecting spiritual powers signify an aspiration for a better future to the rules of our community. More importantly for our discussions some considers Pusaka that Pusaka are objects and property left by the ancestors and are central to the sense of identity of their owners. However, on the other hand Pusaka is also a social construct in that sense, Pusaka are best understood within the context of under which social structure they are operated. Some criteria of Pusaka that could be generated include quality of workmanship and materials, aesthetic value, history and religious significance as well. So from that explanation we see that there are differing point of view. As shown in the treasure of the British Library exhibitions the Jokjakarta manuscripts are being viewed by the British Library as both artistic objects and knowledge container, which in turn could be caused through digital modes without any different than physical reading or physical ownership. On the other hand these same manuscripts at the same time are still considered as the Pusaka of the Palace of Jokjakarta which ultimately places their significance in differing values. As Pusaka, the contact with the physical manuscript is more or at least as important as the content itself. In terms of national and communal identity physical ownership of Pusaka becomes paramount since closer physical engagements could stimulate closer connection to the collective memory as well. So understanding that differing point of view what should we do to move the discussion forward. So as I have discussed in previous slides I hope that I have shown that there are differing regime of values embedded into the same objects by differing communities which should encourage us to be open and understanding to other kind of valuation to an object. As for my second point on equal footing this concerns with the or this concern is generated from other representation example that have happened in Indonesia throughout the years or the decades whereby more of the time the Indonesian themselves have a say or an agency or the power to select which objects they actually wanted to be returned. So the initiative to select object often comes from the country who repatriated the objects. Of course they could be right or on other case they could be less right as well. So as the debacle of the return of the Nusantara collections from in the Netherlands where the discussion about which objects should be returned to Indonesia were happening back and forth and it took longer than two years to actually finalize which objects that can be returned. So in this sense equal footing should mean that the former colonized countries are accepted in the tables and have equal say on which and how and why objects should be repatriated. Thank you and pretty much looking forward to the discussion. Thank you very much to the three speakers at the moment. What we're going to start is a Q&A based on some of the questions that have come into the box that is available to me. So my first question and the first set of questions of course go to the first speaker and this is to Alice Proctor and there's sort of two questions. One of them has to do with asking for more information about why there is media hostility to restitution in the United Kingdom and I would sort of add another part to it which is, is it the case that settler societies and settler citizens you introduced yourself as a settler Australian we are in some sense settler Americans are more open than institutions museum people the public in the UK to possibilities even of discussing restitution or dealing with violent colonial heritage in museums. So I mean yeah I would say for a start that my experience and position as a settler Australian but specifically as someone who's lived in the UK for most of my life but hasn't had UK citizenship most of that time has been a huge part of how I understand my position in museums and the work that I'm doing in relation to colonial history I think it's quite common for people who have a diasporic background or a migratory history in their family like no matter how recent that is in my case it's literally that I was born overseas and I came to the UK in other people's cases it might be like histories of displacement and migration it might be voluntary or involuntary movement. If you have that you're probably more likely to be sensitive to these questions and I think it's no accident that I know who are working on this in the UK are first, second, third generation migrants to this country. In answer to the question about the media amongst conservative media particularly print media in the UK at the moment there has been a very big backlash against what is often referred to as woke politics I don't think that that term is being used correctly there at all I don't think I'm the person to try to define that term but it's used in a kind of catchall in the same way that we see terms like critical race theory being thrown around as a euphemism for essentially history, politics, academic work that decenters white supremacist histories or histories of imperialism and colonialism and instead focuses on those stories as told by the people who were subjugated by imperialism for example. There's been a huge backlash to a number of projects here including some by the National Trust which is a very traditional, very conservative institution but has been involved in creating programs around colonial history and attempting to in the kind of historic houses that they can serve make that history visible and accessible. There have been very direct personal attacks on people who are involved in projects around restitution and repatriation as well as around projects more generally to do with colonial history. It's complicated obviously but there has been a very significant backlash from conservative media particularly outlets on the right about the idea of repatriation and restitution there's just a lot of this going on here at the moment and particular sort of narratives around things like quote on quote cancel culture supposed historical erasure it's the kind of euphemisms and keywords that I think a lot of you are probably familiar with and yeah it's created an environment where many institutions are trying to deal with this but don't necessarily have the resources to give their staff social media training for protection online and that sort of thing. Well thank you very much so the other question still Alice was the idea of whether you could give an example from an object or from a conversations among your tour group what might be the range of emotional responses that you mentioned that left a long lasting impression on you or even the members of your tour group. Yeah so I thought about sharing this but I decided not to because it's quite important I will talk about it now there is content warning that I have to talk about histories of sexual violence in this case and histories and the representation of sexual assault and particularly violence against indigenous women that's the reason I didn't show you the image of it but there is an object in the British Museum that is a Haida carving from what is now British Columbia Haida Guay that shows a man who is most likely European holding a woman who is most likely indigenous at one point and there's a heavy implication in the scene and in the object of sexual violence especially when we put it in the context of what we know about the histories of missing and murdered indigenous women the increased rates of sexual violence and the history of sexual violence as a tool of colonialism used against indigenous women in what is now Canada in the United States I talk about this object because we don't know who made it we don't know why it was made it's kind of considered a tourist object so it's possible that it was made as some kind of like very sick joke but equally we know so little about the maker and so little about its history and provenance that when I talk about it on my tours it's in the context of imagining an alternative narrative here I'm considering that this might in fact be a kind of testimony it's a really heavy subject and it's one of the few places on my tours where I give a specific content warning I give a general content warning at the beginning there are very few objects that require a kind of more explicit and specific like avoid this room if you don't want to have this conversation kind of objects and it is difficult to talk about it's towards the end of my British Museum tour and I find it very like heavy and audience members have told me about personal resonances that they've had with that object and I use it and I work with it because I think it's an important story to tell but it is not an easy story to tell and the difficulty of that is something that I have to be conscious of I have to be conscious of it for the people in my group I have to be aware of the other people in the gallery who might overhear us but it's one of the spaces where I try and create as much empathy as possible and as much consideration as possible partially through the use of content warnings but also by trying to kind of hold and care for the audiences in my tours I hope that answers your question it's a very specific and very tricky case study but that is the kind of most obvious and most extreme example of some of the work that I'm trying to do Thank you very much so there's several questions on digitization which I'll sort of try and put together and they would be both for our other two speakers on Benin and Joke Jakarta and it has to do with the shared fact that you were both talking about artwork that comes out of royal courts that comes out of palaces and was exfoliated, looted as a result of punitive expeditions so both of you kind of laid out an interesting typology of what might be needed for restitution and it's also a hierarchy and a series of steps so there is new relational networks that allow for dialogue educational exchanges there's an admission of guilt is another one there's the physical return there's the offer of digital sharing so you've both come down differently on all these four steps so I was wondering if both of you could each address that what are the problems of each of them especially digital sharing and why would it be rejected or accepted so Dr. Azul Imbay first I think I've actually had an idea some time ago about digital sharing I think I'll also kind of start addressing that by throwing out a question there that how will you feel if your object was stolen and then they want to provide you with digital object back without addressing the original object that to me at first instance is like a slap on the face my colleague Dan Hicks at Oxford will actually look at that the same way I've called him over again now not that he has presented something fantastically different than what Alice is here addressing I think that whole idea of creating copies out of the original thing kind of continue to perpetuate that for which we are trying to distance ourselves from if we have to be sincere I think the first step will be to either admit guilt and let us fashion a way out to address this solution to come to a lasting solution to this problem rather than perpeting around it and looking for ways to avoid addressing the beast in the house digital sharing eventually becomes useful take for instance there is what the European guys from Germany started a few years ago that is called a digital binning project where they are trying to create a digital platform to kind of trap or track where all binning materials are circulated around the globe for such research resources that is understandable but providing digital copies as a way to restitute doesn't really make any sense we are here addressing just binning for instance fairly recently the museum where I am headed to a vaginal we are actually caught up in this thing about some some institution in the Congo which is Central Africa reproducing NFTs of an object that came out from the Congo to Virginia and when this group of creatives wanted to loan this thing to show in the Congo the process of them getting it was so delayed and then they had to sort for other ways to you know find relevance to using that object in the Congo and they went to NFTs using this blockchain technology and they created a version of that object and guess what the Virginia Museum of Fine Art found out that and they said they were not going to do any they were not going to have any relationship with those people anymore that is not a good way to go I know that the object in question doesn't fall within that bracket of object that we are talking about restitution but at least this was a bridge building moment for institution in the west to begin to have that relationship with the continent so by cutting that bridge it means that we still want to remain at the point where we are and why they are dragging for the timing is this object to go back to the Congo another institution came to loan the object and they are prepared to loan it to the other institution that is in America so just to follow up with the French model of giving back the 26 approximately 26 Benin bronzes with no apology no acknowledgement of their role in various punitive expeditions in fact maintaining that they had preserved Benin culture in their museum is that acceptable too that is not acceptable I think I was on a Voice of America program in late November that was in late November where the same question were brought and I think there are two Benins here the country Republic of Benin that you just spoke about used to be Dahome is different from the Benin Kingdom but I think about that is a state within the Nigerian nation so returning 26 objects to Republic of Benin which was a French colony I saw a lot of a lot of fanfare dance and all this elaborate event that welcomed those objects I was first I picked out that first that I do not think to celebrate because returning it was long overdue returning those things and then I kind of become exceptionally happy doesn't really make anything the aggregate of what is stored in French institution I know so so you know bringing some that's fine but again if you go down that lane I think some of what Felwinsa and Benedict Savoie were actually advocating which to some extent tie into what I was saying was that you know there should be more than just the return permit in the case of Senegal there is the museum of mankind that is there in case of the Congo there is a museum that has just been put up there there is one also in Benin in Republic of Benin where some of this 26 objects we eventually go to a museum that is in the works coming to Benin Kingdom in Nigeria so you know this sort of commitment even though they are just like you know spots now I think can be built upon and that now sits with that my idea of human infrastructure because if we put these institutions there and we are not able to adequately address the human infrastructures that were man distanced come back to what we have been kind of beating about around because a lot of stuff will still walk away from these institutions and come back to the West and the West will still purchase them and bring them and keep. We are addressing practical physical institutions that are known today there are individual holdings that we seem to be placing blind eyes on they acquire this object too that is another path that we are going to be looking at after dealing with the actual institutions yes thank you yeah private holders are much harder to track so this would also be a question for PENGA which has to do with not just as you pointed out Pusaka adds another dimension to digital sharing even if it is books and as the questioners pointed out yesterday when we were dealing with the Judaica collections digitization was seen as a positive outcome whereas you are questioning that as a possibility given the fact that there is this idea of Pusaka so the questions would be are objects that are religious or spiritual value to indigenous people either should they be repatriated far more speedily how do we decide that is digitization impossible for this thank you for the question and it is really important discussion to have like I have already said in the presentations I think it all came back to the how we value the objects in some of the Jukjakarta manuscript as of course the library sees the manuscript as more as knowledge holder so the content is more important than the physical books but as Pusaka of the Palace of Jukjakarta the ownership of the physical objects or the manuscripts actually sometimes more important than the content itself and in the most extreme case actually as Pusaka or manuscript as Pusaka the manuscript doesn't really read aloud or doesn't really read at all sometimes the manuscripts in their own cultural systems these manuscripts are so believed to be the house of God as well so that's the important of the manuscript how they put significance to the manuscript because of that the manuscript has the affinity as well so they were worshipping the manuscript as the affinity as well so that's the example for the most extreme spectrum of Pusaka but other than that I think we cannot compare or put similarities between the manuscript and archives I mean archives you can put it online because the content is more of significant value for archive but for manuscripts there are different or differing point of view that we should consider as well and if I might touch upon the admission of guilt some of you mentioned the admission of guilt as way to repatriate objects yes I think that's possible by admitting guilt it will engender repatriation of objects but the other why round is it doesn't really necessary happening because there's one recent case in Indonesia whereby the the Netherlands returned Greece on the traditional dagger of Tiponongoro which is the most revered national hero in Indonesia dates back into 2020 March 2020 but and the the return of the Greece on the dagger actually happened during the visit of the king of the Netherlands to Indonesia and the Greece were sown in the presidential palace of Indonesia with both head of states present at the time when the Greece displayed but they both don't say anything during that ceremony the king of the Netherlands doesn't say what happened on the Greece the Greece was actually taken from Tiponongoro during the when Tiponongoro was tricked to be captured by the the Dutch army you must invite it for peace negotiation and capture by the Dutch army but the king of the Netherlands doesn't say anything about this colonial treasury, this colonial violence on the back of the Greece acquisition during the return of the Greece to Indonesia so repatriation of the object doesn't necessarily engendered or generate admission of guilt in that sense in that example yes, maybe admission of guilt first admission of guilt can engender repatriation but there's also other ways to have repatriation of object other than admission of guilt and as one my last point for disability probably I would also would like to say some words on emotional responses at least talk about it with her audience and I must say that me, myself as someone coming from the former colonized country is also sometimes I feel emotional dealing with object as well because I can see the legacies the long lasting legacies that happens after the colonialism ended but still there is some colonial legacies that still happening those subtle you can see it happening everywhere in Indonesia as well and sometimes dealing with this object, dealing with these legacies bring up emotional responses that really sudden me also so actually my question to Alice is actually whether she ever happened to have audience from from both sides from the former colon and former colonized countries and kind of interaction that happens maybe she could give example on the interactions that would be interesting to hear Yeah, thank you for bringing that up no this is something that happens all the time I have a quite mixed audience in terms of the background of people whether they're sort of from former imperial nations or former colonies people like me who are in a sort of settler liminal space there's a quite wide range of that and I have seen quite intense emotional responses across all of those groups there's often a very strong kind of feeling of guilt that some people will bring and that is quite interesting especially trying to find ways of letting people kind of have their feelings without letting white guilt take over the entire conversation is a really important balance to try and maintain and it's something that it's not always easy to do as part of that as well though there are often people who like find it really difficult to have these conversations and so there might be like an anger response or a feeling of kind of shutting down it's incredibly common and it's happened several times on my tours where I will have people might be expecting to see objects from their community of origin or might not be expecting to see them and then do see them and that can be a particularly emotional response one of the kind of common recurring conversations that I've had with people is more along the lines of like the question of what it means to sort of feel able to have these conversations in a museum space if that makes sense and the experience of being able to say like we can talk about this as a history of trauma, we can talk about this as a history of violence and we can see these objects and recognize that and kind of appreciate their beauty and their artistry and also talk about the violence that brought them here and the kind of juxtaposition of those things of the sort of way that museums celebrate and treasure objects and the absence of that history of violence is I think the space that often provokes the most intense emotional response I think that kind of chimes with what I think you were saying as well about how like it's being aware of the colonial history around these objects that can be quite like intense but yeah I've had conversations with people on my tours who've said like firstly that it's emotional to be able to have these conversations in a museum space to feel kind of able to voice these experiences in a museum space and also the kind of shock, surprise, emotional response of seeing an object that is personally connected to you like it's intense and so much about the way that museums are set up to function and these kind of as colonial institutions and as institutions of western power and you know cultural authority is designed to repress emotion and to emphasize kind of rationality and control and composure and so finding emotional responses can be firstly kind of difficult because of the structure of the institution but it can also be like you can kind of try and shut it down because you're like oh my god I'm in a museum I shouldn't be crying for example and so making space for that and making room for that is yeah something that has happened a lot on my tours and I think recognizing that these are objects with emotional histories as well as material histories is an incredibly important part of the reparative and restitutive process. Well thank you I wanted to ask a series of questions to all three of you about museum displays so as Alice has pointed out these are colonial, imperial institutions, museums as western inventions is it possible to maintain that they would be displayed more accurately more contextually either in Benin or Joe Jakarta can this be done in a UK museum since that's what we're dealing with sort of copying cultural context in some very strange way is that spirituality aspect is that accuracy aspect, contradictory and the very fact of it being a museum does that mean wherever it's located it's going to be that rational emotionalist point of view can you speak aspirationally can you dream about museums can be whether they're in the UK, Joe Jakarta or Benin City so I'll start with Alice I mean, yeah, museums are colonial institutions, I think it's really important to be aspirational about what they could be I hope that it's possible to have a very different approach to museums and I've seen mostly temporary examples but there have been some instances of institutions like working really hard to have a kind of community led and community centred narrative in the stories that they tell I think that's particularly possible outside of the cultural west I think that recognising who is in charge of these museums is just as important as recognising the history of the museum as a colonial institution I would like museums to be better that's why I do the work that I do that's why I work with and around them is that I think that there has to be room for improvement and I don't think they will ever be perfect but they could be a better than they are right now and that is kind of the place that I'm coming at this from I am hopeful that when we see kind of more widespread and long-term restitution to formal colonies and other parts of the world that will also bring a change in museum practice but in the meantime I am focused on museums in the cultural west and all I can do is hope that they keep improving and keep getting better Thank you Dr. Asilumba I think from my own perspective I have always been this dual entity I am both an insider and an outsider I am an African first and foremost and then I represent American institutions and very early on when I came into the museum establishment I have advocated for and remain consistent with the idea of collaborating with the continent Why did I say that? A lot of other materials that museum deal with in the west could fall within that category of what they call archaeological materials meaning that such maybe cultural are either in extinction or there is going to be very hard to trace but Africa provides us with a more different experience Africa as a continent is a continuum there are human beings that still live in the continent that are still creating works, creating art and the cultures that created the art that are stored in western museums are still in existence then what beats my imagination is that I will create this example in 2007 my very good friend Barbara Planckensteiner curator at the museum in Vienna that year she exhibited one of the most comprehensive Benin exhibition that has ever held and it was staged in Vienna, Austria and then it traveled to the museum K. Braun Lee, Jacques Chirac in France and came to the artist in Chicago and then it went back to Europe the Nigerian where they even borrowed some objects from the Palace of the Ober of Benin and they never thought it was necessary to go and at least find a venue out in Nigeria or any other African country where it could be shown a lot of colleagues wanted to go see the show that we are not able to do that but that aside I wonder we are talking about object we are kind of object focused here what about the knowledge production that comes out from the object a continent that is a living continent we are producing knowledge behind or away from being a continent so I think if museums want to be empathic no matter what they want to be they should not escape or avoid that task of going to the continent collaborating with them but if you don't want to go we have all these means to engage with the culture or communities where this object comes from they should be part of the knowledge creation of their material culture if we are really serious to do business that is how it should be because no matter the amount of knowledge we create if it lacks an impute from those cultures we have not started a business yet and I make bold to say that is one of my mandates when I work as a curator I always look out for how the communities are also bringing in their voice into what I curate what I write because that is also a very big way to repair the injustices of the past we are here talking about interpretation that there are many nuances we have to tie up to build that back I agree with Mr. Panah where he says it is not only an admission of guilt that is true knowledge creation should be either a shared responsibility or even should be the responsibility of the owner of the material and then we can now maybe refine it I don't even know what refining is here but this knowledge should also come from its source to help us understand the material even much better so it could come in the form of elaborate contextual materials it could come in a number of ways the exhibition Congo Across the Water that I participated in in 2013 part of what made me refer to that exhibition over and again was this idea of incorporating contemporary artistic creativity of Congo to show that Congo as a as a people and culture did not go into extinction we show contemporary artists who are getting inspiration from historic artistic creativity to fashion new ways of interpreting this culture and also their contemporary realities so yeah I think museums in the west have actually been given that opportunity to amend that bridge I'm very happy to announce that myself and colleagues in American museums with African art collection have actually started a group in a historic committee whereby we kind of walk out modalities about how this collaboration will work in a very ethical way that will benefit both sides because American institutions cannot stand by the wayside and watch what is happening in other places well thank you I would only ask that when you talk about Africa we don't split it the way the Europeans have and you include the entire continent including North Africa because those splits are European and it bothers me as someone who works in North Africa yeah I just separated out yeah I definitely don't I will not separate it because Egypt is Africa it is Africa thank you the last word we give to Pungardia Yonsha please your turn yeah thank you yeah it is I think as Ali said what I've seen in the UK and in the museum landscape in the UK there's definitely a lot has been going on if you ever want to visit museum in UK my advice is don't go to the big museum go to the smaller museums because a lot is happening in the smaller museum for example like in Brighton museums there's a lot of activities going on sometimes like the community let narrative happenings there the museum invited the for example for Asian object from Asia from Iran over some place else in Asia they will invite the descendant from the Asian community but then not just including the narrative for the collection from the museum itself but also asking them to create new objects as a response to that collection which is really interesting thing to me to see and then they will display both objects side by side and see that kind of emotional response to the museum collection as well so a lot is happening in the UK in the smaller museum in the UK I think I forgot to answer question about the spiritual object as well the previous question also related to the aspirational of what can museum do in the future of course the the spiritual aspect of objects sometimes are not present in the museum space I've seen this a lot in Southeast Asian Museum because maybe the spiritual aspect is also something that live closer to the community and the museum as well is sometimes that is open for them to actually accept them and more welcome to accept that kind of aspect but also we need to be very careful how we should deal with spiritual object as well so one example is that the object taken from the Bata people in the Sumatra Island in Indonesia during the 19th century and now in the Brussels Museum in Belgium the contemporary Bata people were asked whether they want the spiritual object to be written back to Sumatra in Indonesia and the answer is actually no they don't want them return because they believe that the spirit are gone, the spirit from the object are already gone so for them it's actually better to have new object created and then put spirit inside this new object rather than having the taken object written to them you need to be very careful with this attribution of spirit object in museum space as well and for my last comment actually because you mentioned Jakarta and Israel so I think for the widely non-western museum as well we've been talking about decolonizing museum in Europe in Northern America but also I need to say that we need to recognize museum in Asia as well in Asia as well in the former colonized country as well some museum here actually originated from the colonial period so they're still having the narrative that was carried from this colonial construct so we need to decolonize them as well and because of the current museum landscape in Asia particularly are a western-led museum practice as well so we kind of need to deconstruct that kind of practice as well and then to decolonize the museum practice in Asia not just in Europe but also in Asia we should be really thinking about what should we do to decolonize the museum space Thank you very much in fact there's some extraordinary real museums in the formerly colonized countries that need to be looked at too so my thanks to all three speakers for an excellent session and Jade will close this session and tell us about the next ones that are coming up. Thank you all very much Thank you so much to Susan and all our speakers for a great discussion we have so much to think about still and discuss this afternoon at two o'clock we will have another program and that one will center on Indigenous Knowledge Systems so it's kind of continuation of this discussion just thank you all for coming here and we hope you will attend the other program and there's another one tomorrow and just a reminder that just continue to check our guide and you will have additional information there and recordings will be on there yeah and if there are questions that are unanswered we might put some answers over there too thank you again so much and apologies for the lateness of this beginning and ending but I hope you enjoyed it bye