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Germany handed over to Colombia on Friday two masks made by the Indigenous Kogi those who had been in a Berlin museum’s assortment for greater than a century, one other step within the nation’s restitution of cultural artifacts as European nations reappraise their colonial-era previous.
The wood “solar masks,” which date again to the mid-Fifteenth century, have been handed over on the presidential palace throughout a go to to Berlin by Colombian President Gustavo Petro. The choice to restitute them follows a number of years of contacts between Berlin’s museum authority and Colombia, and an official Colombian request final 12 months for his or her return.
“We all know that the masks are sacred to the Kogi,” who dwell within the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains of northern Colombia, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier stated on the ceremony. “Might these masks have a very good journey again to the place they’re wanted, and the place they’re nonetheless a bridge between individuals and nature at present.”
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Petro welcomed the return of “these magic masks,” and stated he hopes that “an increasing number of items will be recovered.” He stated at a later information convention with Germany’s chancellor that the Kogi group will in the end determine what occurs with the masks. He added: “I would really like a museum in Santa Marta, however that is my concept and now we have to attend for his or her concept.”
Konrad Theodor Preuss, who was the curator of the forerunner of at present’s Ethnological Museum in Berlin, acquired the masks in 1915, throughout a prolonged analysis journey to Colombia on which he amassed greater than 700 objects. Based on the German capital’s museums authority, he wasn’t conscious of their age or of the very fact they weren’t speculated to be offered.
![Kogi masks](https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2023/06/640/320/kogi_masks.jpg?ve=1&tl=1)
Two “solar masks” utilized by Colombia’s indigenous Kogi individuals have been returned to the South American nation from Germany on Friday. (AP Picture/Markus Schreiber)
“This restitution is a part of a rethink of how we take care of our colonial previous, a course of that has begun in lots of European international locations,” Steinmeier stated. “And I welcome the truth that Germany is taking part in a number one function on this.”
Governments and museums in Europe and North America have more and more sought to resolve possession disputes over objects that have been looted throughout colonial instances.
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Final 12 months, Germany and Nigeria signed an settlement paving the way in which for the return of lots of of artifacts often called the Benin Bronzes that have been taken from Africa by a British colonial expedition greater than 120 years in the past. Nigerian officers hope that accord will immediate different international locations that maintain the artifacts, which ended up unfold far and large, to comply with swimsuit.
Hermann Parzinger, the top of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Basis, which oversees the Ethnological Museum and others in Berlin, famous that the background is especially advanced within the case of the Kogi masks.
They weren’t “stolen in a violent context” and Colombia was already lengthy since an unbiased nation, he stated. Preuss purchased them from the inheritor of a Kogi priest, who “apparently wasn’t entitled to promote these masks” — that means that their acquisition “wasn’t fairly right.”
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“However there may be one other side on this dialogue of colonial contexts, and that’s the rights of Indigenous individuals,” Parzinger added, pointing to a 2007 U.N. resolution stating that artifacts of non secular and cultural significance to Indigenous teams ought to be returned.
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