BERLIN (AP) – Germany handed over to Colombia on Friday two masks made by the Indigenous Kogi folks that had been in a Berlin museum’s assortment for greater than a century, one other step within the nation’s restitution of cultural artifacts as European nations reappraise their colonial-era previous.
The picket “sun masks,” which date again to the mid-Fifteenth century, have been handed over on the presidential palace throughout a go to to Berlin by Colombian President Gustavo Petro. The determination to restitute them follows a number of years of contacts between Berlin’s museum authority and Colombia, and an official Colombian request final 12 months for his or her return.
“We know that the masks are sacred to the Kogi,” who dwell within the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains of northern Colombia, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier mentioned on the handover ceremony. “May these masks have a good journey back to where they are needed, and where they are still a bridge between people and nature today.”
Petro welcomed the return of “these magic masks,” and mentioned he hopes that “more and more pieces can be recovered.”
Konrad Theodor Preuss, who was the curator of the forerunner of right this moment’s Ethnological Museum in Berlin, acquired the masks in 1915, throughout a prolonged analysis journey to Colombia on which he collected greater than 700 objects. According to the German capital’s museums authority, he wasn’t conscious of their age or of the very fact they weren’t imagined to be offered.
“This restitution is part of a rethink of how we deal with our colonial past, a process that has begun in many European countries,” Steinmeier mentioned. “And I welcome the fact that Germany is playing a leading role in this.”
Governments and museums in Europe and North America have more and more sought to resolve possession disputes over objects that have been looted throughout colonial occasions.
Last 12 months, Germany and Nigeria signed an settlement paving the way in which for the return of lots of of artifacts referred to as the Benin Bronzes that have been taken from Africa by a British colonial expedition greater than 120 years in the past. Nigerian officers hope that accord will immediate different international locations that maintain the artifacts, which ended up unfold far and huge, to observe swimsuit.
Hermann Parzinger, the top of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees the Ethnological Museum and others in Berlin, famous that the background is especially complicated within the case of the Kogi masks.
They weren’t “stolen in a violent context” and Colombia was already lengthy since an impartial nation, he mentioned. Preuss purchased them from the inheritor of a Kogi priest, who “apparently wasn’t entitled to sell these masks” – which means that their acquisition “wasn’t quite correct.”
“But there is another aspect in this discussion of colonial contexts, and that is the rights of Indigenous people,” Parzinger added, pointing to a 2007 U.N. decision stating that artifacts of non secular and cultural significance to Indigenous teams must be returned.
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