The question of the restitution of patrimonial objects is currently hotly debated in a world which is a return to the European colonial past and which questions the origin of extra-European objects torn from their original context, as well as their exposure patterns in the West. Director Susan Vogel , an expert on African art, recounts the fast-paced and tragically burlesque journey of a Fang statuette through the 20th century, since its delivery to the West. In his film The Visitor (2007), the Swiss artistUriel Orlow goes to meet Oba Erediauwa, then king of Benin, to question him on the need to repatriate or not the famous bronzes of Benin preserved in the British Museum. Finally, the Senegalese videographerFatou Kandé Senghor films a Casamance artist-ceramist, Seni Camara, whose ancestral know-how is threatened with extinction.These different films help to question the fate and transmission of confiscated objects, all too often dedicated to museification alone.
Uriel Orlow’s film The Visitor is screened alongside Fatou Kande Senghor’s work Giving Birth, and Susan Vogel’s film, Fang: An Epic Journey, followed by an in-conversation with curator Alicia Knock
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