REPARATION AND RESTITUTION

The first time I heard these two words together was back in the 1990s when the Chilean state sought a “legal,” clean, and conflict-free way. A “solution” to the grave effects of crimes against humanity committed during the civic-military dictatorship. The methods used to achieve this neither repaired nor, much less, restored the radical damage that institutional violence had caused to society and all those who had been directly subjected to that violence. The wound, the lack of truth and justice, remain a social fracture. Today, these two words speak to me of the deep colonial wound that remains open.

The four voices invited to contribute to this issue on restitution and reparation speak to us from different territories and spaces, where they are articulating and weaving together anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-patriarchal struggles.

We see that the effects of the coloniality of power and ongoing colonization are more active than ever, with the drums of war from the West, the genocide and terricide of populations and territories like Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Haiti, among many others; the thousands of migrants deported and killed in the migratory processes in the Mediterranean; the plundering of natural resources, and a long etcetera.

Meanwhile, cultural and art institutions attempt to formalize possible responses to the idea of “decolonizing” with gestures that turn out to be more self-complacent than a real solution. All within the programmatic framework that Western states like France, Canada, the United States, or Spain have constructed, once again appropriating the struggles originating from the colonized territories.

The debate on the profound harm that colonization, patriarchy, and capitalism have caused and continue to cause in much of the world is now widely visible, filling book pages, seminar chairs, hours of media debates, in academia and museums. But it is not simply a matter of materially returning objects, as what has been plundered from the territories over these more than five centuries are ways of life, of doing, of existing, as one of our guests, researcher and activist Yuderkis Espinosa Miñoso, points out.

As Yaiza Hernández Velázquez, researcher and another of our guests, reminds us, the necessary and essential restitution of what has been stolen does not resolve anything if it does not participate in the construction of a horizon that redefines private property itself, borders, international legislation, and racial capitalism, among others.

For another of our guests, activist Hache Mau, if we were to speak of a real possibility of transforming art spaces or museums, these should transform into spaces of activism with radical critical reflections on material, epistemic, and symbolic plundering, challenging every structure and supremacist Western canon.

Finally, as researcher and writer Helios F. Garcés points out, it is not possible to decolonize (the museum, the state, our territories) without first transforming the current colonial, patriarchal, capitalist system. Therefore, restitution and reparation are themselves that social transformation, fighting for a more just and oppression-free society.

Beyond where these debates, stagings, and the thousands of formulas we think and discuss in the field of art lead us, processes of restitution and reparation are taking place from within the communities and territories devastated by coloniality. Continuous processes of resistance that sustain other models of life, of doing, of feeling, of seeing, and of thinking.

Perhaps a task we can undertake from the field of art is to review and rethink the role of the museum — and whether its existence is necessary — and from the root, the very concept of art.

(Cover Image: Graffiti wall in Santiago de Chile during the social outburst of 2019. Photo: Nancy Garín)