From Humains Remains to Ancestors

Workshop / From Humains Remains to Ancestors – Displaying · Representing · Fostering dialogue in Museums 13 november 2026 – Centre de la Vieille Charité Marseille

To foster dialogue with a wide audience, the program will take the form of communications, multi-voice interventions and round tables during which community members, historian, museum professionals, researcher, artists, academics, experts… will present the results of their research and share their thinkings on the role of mediation with regard to the presence of ancestral remains in museums.

This workshop (journée d’étude) is part of the program of the working group Collections and collectors of non-Western objects in the Mediterranean – EXOCMED funded by the Mission provenance of the Service des Musées de France and led by the TELEMMe laboratory –
CNRS AMU and the MAAOA – Musées de la Ville de Marseille, but also within the framework of the HERA project – How to study / repatriate “artifacts” – ancestors ? This project is supported by the Franco-German Research Fund on the provenance research on sub Saharan Africa objects in their public institutions – Centre Marc Bloch, the main objective of this project is to create an interdisciplinary network of researchers working on the history of collections of ancestral remains from Central and Southern Africa, with a particular focus on provenance research.
The project brings together two academic institutions in France and Germany (Inherit. Heritage in Transformation, Käte Hamburger Kolleg, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Marseille), two academic institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa (University of Kinshasa, University of the Western Cape) and has as main partners three museum institutions (Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité, and Museum of African, Oceanian, Amerindian Arts of Marseille). This reflection, carried out in dialogue with Experts from outside these institutions, coming from museums or universities of the two countries or from transnational institutions and the communities concerned and/or their representatives, aims to question the ethics of conservation, management and study of ancestral remains.

• Hours: 9 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.
• No reservation: free and unrestricted access within the limit of available places
• Location: All interventions will take place in the Miroir room – Centre de la Vieille Charité, at 2 rue de la Charité in Marseille.
• Filmed for diffusion, notably on the YouTube channel of the museums of Marseille
• Languages: French and English – Headsets for translation available to the public.
• The program whose construction is currently being finalized