Final Conference Pressing Matter | Rethinking the Restitutionary Moment: What Next?

Date: 27-28 November, 2025
Time: 09:00 – 17:00
Location: Wereldmuseum Leiden
Organisation: Pressing Matter, Wereldmuseum, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Research Center for Material Culture
Language: English

The multi-year research project Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums draws to a close at the end of 2025. Pressing Matter, funded by the Dutch Science Agenda (NWA-NWO) and the consortium partners, investigated the future of objects collected in colonial times. It asked about the potentialities of ‘colonial objects’ to support societal reconciliation with the colonial past and its afterlives, and how best to deal with conflicting claims by different stakeholders for these objects.

This final confernce explores what Pressing Matter’s critical friend, Professor Ciraj Rassool, has described as the restitutionary moment we now inhabit. The conference is conceived of as a series of provocations from distinguished international scholars who have been involved, both both theoretically and practically, in the discussions around the question of what to do with the objects collected during the colonial period that now reside in European Museums. Each presenter is asked to respond to the question ‘what now, what next?’. These presentations will be followed by extended conversations with the different researchers from the Pressing Matter project about their initial aims at the beginning of the project, what we have done, and how these aims may have been revised over the period of the project. Importantly, the conference explores what further work must be done to achieve the kinds of changes that Pressing Matter had imagined at the start of the project: to explore how we might conceive of restitution beyond its programmatic and policy limitations, but also to address the questions that this restitutionary moment raises in national and international contexts about living within the afterlives of colonialism.

Achille Mbembe: A Future of Solidarity

The two-day conference is preceded by a Brainwash Special with Achille Mbembe at the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam on Wednesday 26 November 2025, from 19:00-22:00. In this Brainwash Special, Wayne Modest, Director of Content at Wereldmuseum Amsterdam, will be in conversation with Achille Mbembe to discuss the fractures that define our societies today. How do we hold on to solidarity in a world that seems to divide rather than connect? And what might a future look like in which everyone truly matters?