(De)Centering Architecture in the Debate on Repatriation of Artefacts to West Africa The Centre for Urban and Built Ecologies

Summary

David Adjaye’s Museum of West Africa became the trope that epitomised our aspirations for housing returned artefacts, but recent revaluation not only challenges the architecture, it argues that museum physicality as a whole is tangential to the real issues of repatriation.

This project examines the role of architecture in the debate on restitution and the repatriation of artefacts to West Africa. Spaces for cultural objects in the region must now reimagine trans-cultural and trans-era functionality.

Using the Benin bronzes as a case study, the work attempts the key question – is architecture a centrality, or a distraction to the process of repatriation, and how will repatriation be affected if architecture is decentered? The work queries not just the people’s understanding of the museum, but the museum’s understanding of the people in the rapidly evolving cultural matrix of Nigeria.