Pressing Matter Winter School

The aim of the Winter School is twofold: to have Indigenous people help shape the future of restitution and to facilitate to the building of global networks of Indigenous scholars, curators and community practitioners around questions of restitution. The small-scale winter school, limited to 12 participants from different continents, takes place at the Wereldmuseum Leiden and other relevant sites in the Netherlands, and will run for two weeks. Participants have access to the various (museum) collections of partners in the Pressing Matter consortium.* The program consists of sessions on key concepts within restitution work, collection visits, lectures by specialists in the field, and research on specific objects.

The selected participants bring various perspectives, approaches and contexts to the Winter School. They originate from Ghana, South Africa, Rapa Nui, Tahiti, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Surinam, St. Maarten, Mexico, and Canada.

Faculty members include Wayne Modest (Wereldmuseum/VU), Susan Legêne (VU), Wouter Veraart (VU), Laurens de Rooy (Amsterdam UMC), Amade M’charek (UvA), Paul Wolf Mitchell (UvA), Lisette Jong (UvA), Birgit Meyer (UU), Martijn Eickhoff (NIOD), Klaas Stutje (NIOD), Adieyatna Fajri (NIOD), Katja Kwastek (VU), Chiara de Cesari (UvA), Victor de Boer (VU), Cindy Zalm (Wereldmuseum), Mirjam Hoijtink (Wereldmuseum), Carine Zaayman (Wereldmuseum), Sophie van Aardenne (Wereldmuseum), Marieke van Bragt-Kroonen (Wereldmuseum), Karolien Nédée (Wereldmuseum), Wendy Boham (Wereldmuseum), Eveline Sint Nicolaas (Rijksmuseum) & Harm Stevens (Rijksmuseum).

Pressing Matter is a four-year international research program about colonial legacies in museums, financed by the Dutch National Science Agenda (NWA) and coordinated from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. One of the main partners is the Wereldmuseum. Pressing Matter investigates the potentialities of ‘colonial objects’ to support societal reconciliation with the colonial past and its afterlives, and to deal with conflicting claims by different stakeholders for these objects within museums. The project will connect fundamental theories of valuation and property to postcolonial debates on heritage to these societal debates and aims to develop and test, first, new theoretical models of value and ownership and, second, new forms of return that address but move beyond current approaches to heritage restitution, while developing a theory of object potentialities grounded in the entangled, multipolar histories in which colonial objects were collected, kept and made meaningful.

* The Pressing Matter partners are Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Wereldmuseum, Museum Bronbeek, Museum Vrolik, Rijksmuseum, Utrecht University Museum, University Museum Groningen, Foundation Academic Heritage, and NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Societal partners are Imagine IC, The Black Archives, HAPIN Papua Support Foundation, the Rijksakademie, Framer Framed, the Peace Palace Library, the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, and DutchCulture.