The Federal Office of Culture (OFC) will allocate around 1.1 million francs to fourteen provenance research projects carried out by Swiss museums in 2025 and 2026. For the first time, a majority of the requests concerned objects from the colonial or archaeological context rather than the Nazi era.
Among the fourteen museums supported, eight of them obtained funding to explore the colonial period, including two in French-speaking Switzerland, the Geneva Museum of Art and History with 99,411 francs and the Bible+Orient Museum in Fribourg, 100,000 francs, writes the OFC in a press release on Tuesday. The others are located in the large German-speaking cities.
Research projects from six museums were selected on cultural property potentially looted during the era of National Socialism. The Lausanne Historical Museum with 100,000 francs is the only one in French-speaking Switzerland. In German-speaking Switzerland, these are the Kunstmuseum of Bern, Basel, Lucerne, St. Gallen as well as the Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft.
More concentrated funding
The total contribution for the period 2023-2024 amounted to 2 million francs and was distributed across 28 projects in 26 museums, the OFC told Keystone-ATS. During this phase, the contributions granted were sometimes lower than the amounts requested. For the period 2025-2026, however, approved projects will receive the entire requested contribution.
This work makes it possible to trace the origin of a cultural heritage with a potentially problematic past and to then communicate the results. Initially focused on art looted during the era of National Socialism, this support, launched in 2016, has since 2018 also focused on research on goods from colonial and archaeological contexts. In addition to conventional provenance research projects, digitalization and enhancement of archive funds will also be supported, as well as research and mediation projects, in collaboration with countries of origin.
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