November 28, 2017, Emmanuel Macron, pledged to pave the way for the temporary or permanent restitution of African cultural heritage in France within five years. \u201cI cannot accept that a large part of the cultural heritage of several African countries is in France,\u201d the French president said in a speech at the University of Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. \u201cThere are historical explanations for this, but there is no valid, lasting and unconditional justification. African heritage cannot be only in private collections and European museums.\u201d<\/p>\n
Four years later, 26 works of art from the royal treasures of Abomey were returned to the Republic of Benin, finally returning to their land of origin after nearly 130 years away. They had been looted in November 1892, when an expeditionary force led by Colonel Dodds entered Abomey, the capital of the kingdom of Danhom\u00e8 located in the south of the current African country. These artifacts were then donated to the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Ethnographie du Trocad\u00e9ro in the 1890s, before joining the collection of the Mus\u00e9e du Quai Branly \u2014 Jacques Chirac in 2003.<\/p>\n
Step into the \u201clootyverse\u201d<\/p>\n
However, the restitution of African cultural heritage is still in its early stages. A 240-page report from academics B\u00e9n\u00e9dicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr estimates that 90,000 works looted from sub-Saharan Africa during the colonial era are currently held in French public collections. Many others are exhibited in British, Dutch and American museums.<\/p>\n
Faced with the scale of the phenomenon, a collective has decided to play its part in helping to reclaim these works of art through NFTs. \u201cOur \u2018Looters\u2019 go to the museums (physically) and take back the artworks (digitally),\u201d reads the project website. In other words, the anonymous members of the collective scan the artifacts looted in Africa and create digital copies of them in the form of NFTs. Six of them are available to buy on the Rarible platform, with a starting price of 0.9 Ethereum (or US$1,770, at the time of writing).<\/p>\n
Part of the profits from their sale will be donated to the \u201cLooty\u201d fund, which grants scholarships to young artists from Africa. The collective also aims to build a metaverse \u2014 or \u201clootyverse\u201d \u2014 where the NFTs of these looted artworks will be exhibited. The collective sees this as a form of digital restitution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The restitution of cultural property looted during the colonial era continues to be a controversial issue. If countries like France and the Netherlands are stepping up initiatives in this field, many previously looted countries are still struggling to recover their cultural heritage. A situation that the NFT project \u201cLooty\u201d hopes to help remedy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12963,"featured_media":9087,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,16],"tags":[7,30,26],"class_list":{"0":"post-9090","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture","8":"category-news","9":"tag-apie-project","10":"tag-culture","11":"tag-news"},"yoast_head":"\n