Translocations

Who owns cultural assets? Who has narrative control? What could fair and just approaches to dislocations of cultural assets look like, independently of restitution? Discussions about historical appropriation practices for cultural assets in the context of their associated relocation are highly topical and widely reflected across different academic disciplines. Such questions increasingly concern those who work in the art market, museums, politics and the media, scholars from diverse disciplines, as well as artists and writers. This volume examines the translocations as such, which rarely come into focus. The contributions address the people involved, the related traumas, discourses, gestures, techniques, and representations.

Bénédicte Savoy (Prof. Dr.) teaches modern art history at the Technische Universität Berlin and holds an international chair at the Collège de France, Paris. In 2016 she was awarded the Leibniz Prize by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and of the German Academy for Language and Literature. Together with Professor Felwine Sarr she delivered a report commissioned by the French president Emmanuel Macron on proposals for the restitution of African cultural objects in French museums. Felicity Bodenstein (Dr.) teaches collection and museum history at the Sorbonne University in Paris. Prior to this, she was a research assistant in Prof. Bénédicte Savoy's 'translocations' project at the Technische Universität Berlin and works on questions of the art market and the museography of objects looted in Benin in 1897. Merten Lagatz is project coordinator of the Leibniz-Prize-funded (DFG) project cluster 'translocations - Historical Enquiries into the Displacement of Cultural Assets' at the chair of modern art history at Technische Universität Berlin. He studied theatre studies, German literature, and art history with a focus on museum history. His research interests include the postwar history and theory of architecture, queer practices, and the arts in the now.