It was on a tour of the British Museum years ago that Mohegan theater artist Madeline Sayet (Where We Belong) discovered a collection of Native American skulls—objects the museum classified as artifacts, but which she understood as ancestors, alive with the yearning to return home. In Gabriela Wiener’s irreverently witty novel, Undiscovered (tr. Julia Sanches), the Peruvian writer is confronted by her complicated family colonial heritage in a museum in Paris when she discovers the man responsible for pillaging these pre-Columbian artifacts was her own great-great-grandfather. In Who Owns Beauty? (tr. Andrew Brown), French art historian Bénédicte Savoy, whose work has fundamentally reshaped debates on provenance, museums, and cultural restitution, asks us to examine how great works of art collected in Western museums came to be there.
In a conversation moderated by Executive Director of Artists at Risk Connection, Julie Trébault, these writers ask: what do the journeys of human remains, cultural artifacts, and iconic artworks reveal about our history? What makes the violence and asymmetries that have shaped their extraction, preservation, and return both collective and deeply personal experiences?
