In the last few years, restitution has become an urgent topic for museums, politics, and academia. In disciplines like ethnography, art history, and history, the legacy of looting and, more generally, colonial injustice and violence has finally led to a sensitivity for the inequalities between nations and the necessities of repair. While the debate is mostly concerned with material artefacts like statues, paintings, historical sources, and documents, the specificities of audiovisual media have not been at the center of attention.

In a workshop with Nikolaus Perneczky (London), we hope to open up an interdisciplinary discussion about the contexts, stakes, and perspectives of the restitution debate when it is approached from the particular requirements of audiovisual media. Responding to the premise that "rethinking restitution through the medium-specific affordances and operations of the moving image compels a reconceptualization of that paradigm" (Perneczky and Valenti), current fellows of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg Global dis:connect are invited to share their experiences, questions, and propositions.

Participants: Nikolaus Perneczky (London), Hadeel Abdelhameed, Sarah Smith, Toby Yuen-Gen Liang, Katy Deepwell (global dis:connect fellows), Fabienne Liptay (University of Zurich, global dis:connect alumna), Burcu Dogramaci (director global dis:connect)

Organized by Volker Pantenburg, Philip Widmann, and Nikola Radic in cooperation with global dis:connect as part of the research project Paranational Cinema — Legacies and Practices at the University of Zurich, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Free admission, please register here.

Thursday, 4 December 2025
09:30 to 16:30
global dis:connect
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
Maria-Theresia-Straße 21
81675 Munich