CO-OP

CO-OP

Menu

What We Do

 Circumambulating Objects: on Paradigms of Restitution of Southeast Asian Art (CO-OP) will comprise a 3-year programme of 10-day travelling seminars, the first in Thailand, the second, Indonesia, and the last, Cambodia. The annual programme unites individuals with a commitment to examining local Southeast Asian epistemologies and needs at the intersection of current global debates around restitution. 

CO-OP seeks to highlight a regional consciousness in the Southeast Asian art, archaeology, and museology fields. Considering a spectrum of experience of and engagement with restitution across the region, our work focuses on nuanced connected histories where ‘art’ circulates in space and time and derives its meanings from shifting contexts. CO-OP builds a diverse cohort equipped with the knowledge, critical and professional skills, and academic resources necessary to approach restitution processes in the region today in a manner which is at once locally meaningful and globally aware.  

A group of fourteen persons sit in a circle facing each other. They are on a large flat rock next to a river in a wooded setting.

Building Knowledge

Awareness of restitution processes in Southeast Asia has dramatically increased in recent years through a series of mediatized returns and forensic investigations into the complex networks facilitating looting and illicit trafficking over the course of the 20th century. Each site of encounter with restitution embodies significant variation in approach and engagement. Attentive to local specificities, CO-OP works to challenge interpretive prisms defined by the art market which have conditioned physical and institutional violence.

View of board room table with four seated. The woman in the middle is speaking to a group not visible.

Circulating Resources

Internal discussions reflect out as a resource platform. We will make our thinking, reading lists, and resolutions publicly available on CO-OP media and by use of cohort networks. We share our work with an aim to collectively reinscribe sources of knowledge creation. 

An older man stands on a step around the perimeter of a Khmer temple. He leans down to a group of four on the ground below. They look down at an object in his hands.

Attention to practice

‘Art’ does not return to the same context from which it was first displaced. The new home has to be created in the stead of the old – in stores, on display, in museums, temples or palaces; in turn, wherever ‘art’ is, it contributes to the ongoing making of ‘home.’ With attention to local economies of care, preservation and interpretation, we ask how conversations about restitution can turn into practices of respect.