A collective of artists and agricultural workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo is calling out a blind spot in the museum world's reckoning with its past. While major institutions have spent recent years returning looted objects and acknowledging indigenous land rights, the Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (Congolese Plantation Workers Art League) argues these efforts mean little to the communities whose labor actually built these museums.
The group's point is straightforward: many of the world's most prestigious museums—the Tate Britain in London, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, the Stedelijk in Amsterdam—were financed by wealth extracted from plantations. The workers who labored on those plantations made what CATPC calls "involuntary investments" in institutions they'll likely never visit, let alone benefit from.
The connection runs deeper than history. Peter Ludwig, after whom the Cologne museum is named, owned a chocolate factory dependent on African cacao. The debt isn't settled; it's ongoing.
We're a new kind of news feed.
Regular news is designed to drain you. We're a non-profit built to restore you. Every story we publish is scored for impact, progress, and hope.
Start Your News DetoxA toolkit for change
Rather than simply naming the problem, CATPC has built a response. In November, three artists from the collective—Mbuku Kimpala, Ced'art Tamasala, and Matthieu Kasiama—presented a "Seven Easy Steps for Museums to Liberate the Plantations that Funded Them" toolkit at a restitution conference in Amsterdam. The steps are concrete: museums should identify and publicly acknowledge their plantation wealth, reach out to plantation communities to educate them and listen, and design programs that let those communities directly benefit from the institutions.
It's worth noting the toolkit is free and available online. CATPC isn't gatekeeping the conversation.
The collective itself emerged from Lusanga, DRC, in 2014, founded by plantation workers who began making art to expose the conditions they faced. Their sculptures—often crafted from chocolate—carry a sharp symbolic weight: they transform the crop that caused so much suffering into an artistic statement about that very suffering. The work has traveled far. CATPC represented the Netherlands at the 2024 Venice Biennale and exhibited at the Armory Show in New York. They've also built their own museum, the White Cube, designed by architect David Gianotten.
Beyond art, the group works toward land restoration, food security, and climate resilience in their region. The toolkit is part of a larger push: making institutions acknowledge not just what they took, but what they owe.
