Dahomey. Courtesy of MUBI
On March 15, 1990, French author and ethnologist Jacques Kerchache published a manifesto in Libération signed by 150 artists, scholars, and dignitaries imploring the Louvre Museum to open an eighth section devoted to the art of non-European civilizations, chiefly, Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. Developing upon the efforts of French intellectuals before him, who advocated for such inclusion of Indigenous art in cultural institutions, Kerchache wrote, “The masterpieces of the entire world are born free and equal.” The impact of the manifesto, neatly summarized by this adage, persuaded former President of France Jacques Chirac—partially acting in the interest of detractors who felt these artworks would taint the Louvre’s prestige—to dismantle the existing multicultural institutions in Paris and combine their 275,000 art objects to create an institute devoted exclusively to Indigenous cultures: the Musée du Quai Branly.
A jury was created in 1999 to elect an architect to design the museum through an international competition, which was won by Jean Nouvel, whose previous design credits included the Arab World Institute and the Fondation Cartier. The Musée du Quai Branly, which opened its doors in 2006, is located on the Left Bank and cast in the shadow of the city’s towering pylon, low to the roads and following the curve of the Seine with tall glass paneling and varicolored cubes lining its frontage. In Nouvel’s own words, “It is an asylum for censored and cast off works [...] a loaded place haunted with dialogues between the ancestral spirits of men, who, in discovering their human condition, invented gods and beliefs.” Stéphane Martin, then president of Quai Branly, conversely called it a “neutral environment” with “no aesthetic or philosophical line,” a tangle of styles, traditions, and histories under the guise of progressive refuge. The establishment of the new museum cost €233,000,000.
Mati Diop’s trim, 68-minute documentary Dahomey (2024)—which won the Golden Bear at Berlinale earlier this year—recounts the diplomatic aftermath of the 2018 report The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics, written by Senegalese academic Felwine Sarr and French art historian Bénédicte Savoy: 250 pages on confiscated objects of worship residing in Quai Branly alongside an actionable plan to restitute the items to their countries of origin. Artistic repatriation is a growing concern in museum circles; some institutions have taken to putting forth statements inviting repatriation requests, while others have publicized the artifacts returned to their native countries. Quai Branly is one of many museums that faced scrutiny, not least of all given its recency and commitment to Indigeneity. In the dramatized events of Diop’s film, 26 royal artifacts from the Kingdom of Dahomey (present-day Benin) are to be relinquished to a museum in Abomey after touring Benin.
Dahomey observes the affective residue of such appropriation and colonial order—the 26 treasures were among thousands looted by French colonial troops during the Second Franco-Dahomean War in 1892—from three key perspectives: Quai Branly museum workers, discoursing students at the University of Abomey-Calavi, and crucially, the 26th artifact in transit, given an echoic, disembodied voice with which to express its exasperation. The figure, an anthropomorphized, 500-pound bronze statue of Ghezo, King of Dahomey from 1818 to 1858, speaks first of the foreign walls in which he is confined over a black screen: “Uprooted… ripped out… today it’s me they’ve chosen like their finest and most legitimate victim.”
These oblique sections (written and voiced by Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel) present a conflicting perspective of the artifact’s supposed liberation as a secondary displacement—a wrinkle in the fabric of decolonial theory. The commodified object knows it is captive and dispossessed, anxious for its journey back to a country it has not known for centuries, and skeptical of the intentions of those transferring it. “26… Why didn’t they call me by my real name? Don’t they know it?” laments the statue, expressing a twofold fear of being both venerated and misrecognized. This distrust seems to spill onto the other art objects being transported: a sculpture of a throne from the village of Cana and a statue of Béhanzin, King of Dahomey from 1890 to 1894.
As with Diop’s debut feature Atlantics (2019), a coruscating ghost story that contends with migration, poverty, and misplaced culpability in a suburb of Dakar, Dahomey considers the violent incongruity between plush, futuristic sites and their adjacent histories. Atlantics begins with the construction of an ultramodern tower by unpaid laborers whose working conditions have become untenable, while Dahomey begins with footage of a street hawker in Paris selling light-up tchotchkes under the Eiffel Tower, before cutting to gloved hands cradling sculptures in Quai Branly. (The distorted speech of the Ghezo statue lends a similarly spectral quality to the film, a transnational tour guide with no sense of home.)
The bowels of Quai Branly, where the reserves are kept, are fittingly unheimlich: sterile, gray passageways lit with fluorescent lamps, accessible only through a network of screens and security cameras. Cinematographer Joséphine Drouin-Viallard presses in on these images of surveillance, duplicating their rhythms and enacting an environment in which art is in custody, just a few floors below the Crayola-colored foyer. When Quai Branly opened in 2006, architecture critic Michael Kimmelman wrote in The New York Times that the museum presented itself as “a kind of ghetto for the ‘other’ […] devised as a spooky jungle,” in which “colonialism of a bygone era is replaced by a whole new French brand of condescension.”
In Dahomey, there is interestingly little intervention against the museum from which the artifacts are being removed, its contentious inception, and the 2018 report that spurred their withdrawal. Diop’s decision to place the narrative focus on the looted art, while gesturing to its selective confinement, is sound but could stand to further implicate institutional strongholds or locate them within the wider movement against colonial plundering. There is, however, a visual language of violence running parallel to the museum’s panoptic conditions. In one moment, the Ghezo statue is being packed into a crate, its neck hung in place with a thick rope; the castigation of the object is made more graphic by its resemblance to the ruler, who is said to have been assassinated.
The film’s runtime is spent between the preparation of the sculptures in France, the cataloging of damage to the objects under French conservatorship in Abomey, and a forum of university students in Abomey-Calavi. The latter group takes turns submitting their perspectives into a microphone on the subjects of cultural patrimony, France’s waning power in Africa, and the President of Benin’s cooperation with the French government in returning the art. Some are skeptical of restitution that spotlights the “materialization of bygone revolts,” while others feel they are owed these parts of their lineage. “Restituting 26 out of 7,000 is an insult,” one student says. Another quickly responds, “Start accepting the little you have, then develop a technique to get the others back.” Diop moves with a kind of opacity while repeatedly questioning if repatriation is an act of unbuilding or merely gestural. She presents a cross-section of competing ideas surrounding restitution and cultural soft-power without committing to any one ideological stance—a directorial posture that challenges the very material it observes.
Dahomey is rich with theory and iconography—at times densely so—with which to understand the mechanics of repatriation on the level of an individual collection. A veritable hammer throw of long-unresolved ideas shrewdly arranged by Diop, the film does not feel investigative but rather curious about the emotional and physical labor involved in handling ancient art. Its use of magic realism as a mode of critique elevates the material to the psychic-spiritual place in which it can exist fully and expressively, beyond the walls of the Musée du Quai Branly. As the disembodied statue affirms at the end of the film: “I’ll no longer mull over my incarceration in the caverns of the civilized world.”
Saffron Maeve is a Toronto-based critic and curator.