the president of Quai Branly advocates the circulation of works rather than their restitution

For Stéphane Martin, who has been president since 1998 of the Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris, where 70,000 works of African art are collected from some 90,000 French public collections, the report submitted last week to President Macron has "a problem principal ":" It puts far too much the museums on the sidelines for the benefit of the specialists of the memory repair ".

The colonial spot

At the request of Emmanuel Macron, the academics Bénédicte Savoy, from the Collège de France, and Felwine Sarr, from the University of Saint-Louis in Senegal, set the stage for a return to sub-Saharan Africa of works of art. art transferred during colonization. They have identified tens of thousands of potentially affected works. "We need a right to heritage for all humanity, not just for Europeans who have the privilege of mobility, the privilege of inheriting war situations that allowed them to have all these objects," said Sunday Bénédicte Savoy on TV5 Monde.

While recognizing an interesting historical work, Stéphane Martin regrets the conclusions of the report, establishing in his opinion that "all that was collected, bought in the colonial frame is touched by the impurity of the colonial crime". It "opens up a field of complete" surrenderability. "These are maximalist proposals," he told AFP. It would thus be possible to return "donations to museums from people related to colonization (administrators, doctors, soldiers) and those of their descendants, and especially everything that was collected by scientific expeditions". There have been free gifts, he adds, citing those of the great leaders of Cameroon to a doctor, Pierre Harter, who had treated their families with leprosy.

The solution for Stéphane Martin: circulation of works

Another point is crumpling it: the idea of ​​a "mixed commission" for each request for restitution filed by a State. "In French law, it would be a great innovation that a foreign state is at parity with the French nation to determine what is rightly or not in its heritage".

Stéphane Martin believes that the statement of the Elysee broadcast on November 23 does not endorse the idea of ​​massive restitution: "As I read it, it closes the door to the Sarr-Savoy report by insisting that museums, and especially universal museums, are an important element of the common heritage of mankind, and that circulation remains the principal means of cultural diffusion. " This diffusion goes through "loans, deposits, circulation, exhibitions", he adds, quoting this press release.

Restitution on a case by case basis

Emmanuel Macron, says the owner of the Quai Branly, also said that the refunds "can, in very specific cases, be considered", as for the catches of the statues of Benin exhibited at Quai Branly. "These transfers of state-to-state ownership, there have always been," says Stephane Martin. "The current legal apparatus" seems to him enough for the decommissioning of these works. "The Getty has returned objects to Italy, the British Museum to Australia, the Guimet Museum to China". But "it can not be the only way, otherwise we will empty European museums and we enter a logic where heritage becomes the hostage of memory," he fears.

Besides restitutions, "other means are to be implemented that go through museums," he continues. He suggests "help to build new places, work with private collectors, foundations", such as the Zinsou Foundation which organized a first exhibition Basquiat in Lomé. The president "invites museums to play a vital role while the report says they are captors", according to Stéphane Martin. The Ministry of Culture has a central role to play judges: "It's up to him to reflect with his European colleagues and organize a reflection of museum to museum, with African museums, other French museums, European museums, on this circulation ". In Germany (with the new Humboldt Forum in Berlin) and in the United Kingdom, he says, reflections have already been made.