Co‑hosted by the CDHM and the Visual Arts Department of HEAD – Genève (HES-SO), the film follows 26 objects from the Kingdom of Dahomey as they leave Paris and are returned to present-day Benin, exploring questions surrounding how these art treasures, stolen from ancestors, may be received in a country which has reinvented itself in their absence. 

The following panel discussion including Angelo Dan, Ambassador, Deputy
Permanent Representative of the Republic of Benin to the United Nations in Geneva, Didier Houénoudé, professor at the University of Abomey and Acting Deputy Director of the State Ethnographic Collections in Dresden, Carine Ayélé Durand, director of the Museum of Ethnography Geneva (MEG), Makenzy Orcel, novelist and poet, Paris, and Patricia Spyer, professor of Anthropology & Sociology at the Institute, was chaired by Doreen Mende, professor HEAD – Genève and Director of the Research of the State Art Collections in Dresden, and the CDHM’s Grégoire Mallard. 

The panel covered a range of themes from the panelists’ personal experience in the process of restitution of archives, diplomacy and the making of the film — to methods of postcolonial digitisation and digital archiving for an audience of 90+ faculty, students and members of the public. Leading up to the Friday event Prof. Houénoudé co-led a five-day seminar course organised with HEAD – Genève (HES-SO) on process and issues involved in the restitution of African heritage (mainly Benin) and collaborative projects between African and Western researchers on provenance research for students of the Visual Arts Department of HEAD – Genève (HES-SO). A special session of this seminar based on the film and held at the MEG, “Within me resonates infinity”, was attended by students of CDHM Scientific Committee member and event panelist,
Prof. Patricia Spyer, for her course "Decolonizing the Image? Questions of Power, Alternative Historicities, Visual Experimentation" (ANSO168).