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School of Languages, Linguistics and Film

Restitution and the Moving Image

As calls for the return of looted artefacts from Western museums and ethnological collections intensify, what about similarly sequestered Global Majority film heritage? This project, led by Nikolaus Perneczky and supported by the Leverhulme Trust, considers colonial legacies of uneven development and unequal exchange in global audiovisual archiving through the lens of restitution. The research has two interrelated aims: firstly, to develop concrete strategies of redress with policy implications for legal frameworks and institutional governance; and secondly, to explore in a more speculative register both challenges and possibilities arising from the conjunction of “restitution”—a paradigm elaborated in relation to irreproducible artefacts and human remains—with the technical object of film, its medium-specific affordances and operations after the digital turn. Publications include a chapter in the edited collection Accidental Archivism (meson press, 2023), arguing the case for restituting Africa's displaced film heritage, an article in the journal Sources, on African archival filmmaking as restitutive practice (under review), and the edited volume Restitution and the Moving Image: On the Politics and Ethics of Global Audiovisual Archiving (Amsterdam University Press, in progress).

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