Bogotá’s Museo Nacional de Colombia is displaying off the 1,194 pre-Columbian artefacts repatriated to the nation between 2022 and 2026, below President Gustavo Petro’s outgoing administration. (Abelardo de la Espriella, a far-right lawyer who narrowly gained the latest election, will take workplace on 7 August.)
The objects are on public view for the primary time within the exhibition Pasados en retorno. Repatriación del patrimonio arqueológico (till 23 August). Recovered via efforts carried out in 13 international locations, 80% of the artefacts have been voluntarily returned, whereas the remaining items have been present in auctions or linked to illicit trafficking networks, main the Colombian authorities to take authorized motion to get them again.
The artefacts have been repatriated primarily from the US (384 objects), Italy (208), Chile (174), Germany (149) and Canada (127). Smaller numbers additionally got here from the UK, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Peru, Costa Rica, Venezuela and New Zealand.
Ceramics, sculptures, funerary objects, anthropomorphic figures, necklaces, amulets and different objects related to not less than 14 archaeological areas have been introduced collectively for the exhibition—co-organised along with the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and Historical past (ICANH) and the ministries of tradition and overseas affairs.
Courtesy: Mauricio Idarraga / Museo Nacional de Colombia
The exhibition displays the range of Indigenous communities whose presence in what’s now Colombia dates again to not less than 2000BC. The objects—comprised of a big selection of supplies, produced in numerous intervals and formed via a variety of strategies—protect ancestral information and methods of understanding the world.
Among the many most vital examples, Natalia Angarita (the museum’s archaeology curator) factors to the gathering voluntarily returned by the Museum of Anthropology on the College of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. “That case exhibits the efforts of some museums to rethink their function as establishments, evaluate whether or not they maintain items that belong to different international locations, and recognise the significance of repatriation, particularly for international locations within the International South,” Angarita tells The Artwork Newspaper.
That is the one case of a repatriation from a museum assortment on show. Many of the others resulted from particular person selections, together with these of Jessica Lawrence within the US and Michelle Guigoz in Switzerland, who returned artefacts they’d inherited from their households. “Each may have saved the items of their possession and by no means mentioned something, however they realised that what they’d have been objects their grandparents or great-grandparents had acquired at a time when the thought of cultural heritage, as we perceive it immediately, didn’t exist,” Angarita says.
For the curator, these three examples level to an moral reconsideration of private and non-private collections. In addition they present that returns usually come via particular person or institutional initiatives reasonably than government-led processes.
Courtesy: Mauricio Idarraga / Museo Nacional de Colombia
The exhibition frames repatriation as a part of a sustained coverage to guard heritage. “Behind each recovered piece there’s a technical, authorized, diplomatic and institutional course of,” says a spokesperson for the Grupo de Patrimonio Cultural Mueble. The group, a part of Colombia’s cultural ministry, oversees the Nationwide Program to Forestall and Counteract the Illicit Trafficking of Cultural Property. Background materials supplied by the ministry additionally notes that the federal government used the presidential plane and naval coaching ship ARC Gloria to carry the artefacts again.
Pasados en retorno additionally attracts consideration to 2 emblematic repatriation claims that stay unresolved: the Quimbaya Assortment, held on the Museo de América in Madrid, and the San Agustín stone sculpture assortment on the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. “We couldn’t overlook the pending instances,” Angarita says. “These are simply two of many related instances, however they’re notably important as a result of they contain European governments and have particular traits that make them distinctive.”
The Quimbaya Assortment, comprising 122 pre-Columbian artefacts, was given by the Colombian authorities to the Spanish queen María Cristina in 1893. “It’s a case with many ambiguities, as a result of it was a ‘present’ to the Spanish monarchy greater than a century in the past,” Angarita says. “However for a number of years now, we have now been re-evaluating whether or not that present was really acceptable, considering the significance of these items, their provenance and the logic that prevailed on the time.”
The case of the San Agustín statues can be “distinctive”, Angarita says. “There may be very robust public demand for his or her return, and the items don’t play a distinguished function on the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. Slightly, they’re saved in storage.” Each instances, Angarita notes, are additionally topic to courtroom rulings that require the Colombian authorities to hunt their repatriation.
Pasados en retorno. Repatriación del patrimonio arqueológico, till 23 August, Museo Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá
