A Botany of Life: Mati Diop’s Dahomey

A coruscating film that traces the restoration of 26 plundered treasures from France to the Republic of Benin, Mati Diop’s Dahomey (2024) frames the process of restitution as resurrection. “Life,” one student states in this prismatic, hybrid documentary, “was taken out of these works.” Applying an animating kaleidoscope of approaches to the antiquities’ momentous homecoming, Dahomey illuminates how the restitution of African art gives that life back in various, vital forms. 

Colonial French forces looted these 26 objects, along with thousands of others, when they sacked the royal palace of Dahomey (the West African kingdom now known as Benin) in 1892. Stolen away to mainland France, the majestic artifacts then moved between two Parisian museums over the course of the twentieth century. In the 2000s, the spoils landed at Paris’s Quai Branly, an ethnographic museum to which Jacques Chirac appended his presidential name, along with the liberal ideology that dominated the new millennium. The Quai Branly was predicated on ideas of freedom and equality, despite the violent provenance of so many artworks within the collection. Reckoning with these histories, Emmanuel Macron stunned the world in November 2017 when he committed to creating conditions for the “temporary or permanent” return of African artifacts. That the process of restitution started so soon was a shock to Mati Diop, who told one interviewer that she “saw it happening in 2070 or 2080.” But the future—at least the hopeful beginnings of it—came around faster than that. By March 2021, Dahomean statues, thrones, and other palatial remnants began to be boxed into shipping crates and prepared for flight to the Beninese capital, Cotonou. One year later, they were exhibited at the city’s Palais de la Marina in an internationally newsworthy show celebrating an historic moment for African art. 

Dahomey echoes an emphatic statement from Diop’s debut, Atlantics (2009): “Forget Europe. Let’s talk about here, in Africa.” But it starts in Paris, with opening images that reduce the French capital to little but a tourist destination: cheap Eiffel Tower souvenirs, a fine-dining cruise on the Seine. Behind the scenes at the Quai Branly, Diop momentarily switches to infrared CCTV footage. Colorlessness augments the morgue-like atmosphere of vacant, metallic corridors—the night-vision images aligning with historical ideas of museums as mausoleums, places where art comes to die. Diop finds the same recording devices installed in the Palais de la Marina, and a militarized presence too, but explicitly flecks Cotonou with a vibrancy that sets it apart from Paris. That old beating heart of high culture has gone cold.

Documenting with observational interest the museum professionals in Paris and Cotonou, Diop disproves one dubious argument against restitution: that institutions in Africa lack the material and human resources to care adequately for art. As happens in any European museum, so happens here: purple-gloved archivists, assiduous condition reports—the 220 kilogram statue of King Ghézo, for instance, is stable, despite some oxidisation and deformation to the painted wood, metal, and fibre. To this diligent detail, Diop introduces poetic touches, enlivening what would remain dry, dusty, and academic in the hands of a neutral filmmaker. 

With a mesmeric script from an acclaimed Haitian writer in Makenzy Orcel, the film gives speculative voice to the statue of King Ghézo, at intervals projecting Orcel’s shimmering words into the placeless darkness of a black screen. Speaking with some ambivalence and trepidation about being shipped to West Africa at first, Ghézo then gives himself up to the “tropical caress” of that native land. His awakening to sub-Saharan heat after decades of alienation becomes ecstatic through vibrating, superimposed images, coloring Cotonou’s gardens with holographic delights. 

This is indeed a resurrection. This is, as the statue intones, “the smell of childhood, a road to myself.” That a sense of identity is individually and collectively restored with the restitution of art is one thread of reason woven into a compelling debate at the University of Abomey-Calavi, which stands minutes away from the Palais. Departing further from the objective distance that typifies observational documentary, Diop intervened in events here. Only a handful of students had initially planned to discuss the return of the 26 artifacts on their school radio, but Diop instigated a bigger conversation, and ended up filming dozens of attendees for a rewarding six hours.

When Dahomey was awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, Abomey-Calavi’s student voices were amplified beyond the reach of a radio station, and Diop’s edit of the intelligent, energetic debate covers the manifold complexity of restitution in an astonishingly short amount of time. Surely it is an insult, to give back just 26 out of thousands? Just a presidential vanity project, on Beninese and French sides. Worthless, if certain African children and the woman who sells talé-talé fritters on the street lack the means to enter the exhibit. Acknowledging the university is also an institution with hierarchies of access, Diop intermittently breaks away from the eloquent, educated youth of Benin. Just as Diop’s earlier films about contemporary waves of migration are careful not to romanticize either movement or stasis, Dahomey offers equal consideration to those who interact with the realm of art and those who cannot, or simply do not. Outside of the university walls, teens are dozing off; they are daydreaming about other things than restitution.   

Drifting attention also characterizes Diop’s miniature works made for fashion houses: Olympus (2017), In My Room (2020), and Tokyo Trip (2023), which respectively advertise clothes for Kenzo, Miu Miu, and Chanel. Diop does not put the object to be appreciated on a distant pedestal in any of these haute-couture collaborations. As in Dahomey, precious items—expensive dresses, priceless treasures—are enmeshed with the fabric of life. Attuned to the textures of a given place (whether Tokyo, Paris, or Cotonou), Diop passes time with bar and café chatter, daily lulls of sidewalk smoking, or the specific quality of a city’s breeze. Back at the Palais in Dahomey, a boy in a giraffe shirt disregards the exhibited art and dances instead.

Around him, glass vitrines and display plinths aggrandize the artifacts. Mimicking the little dancer’s irreverence, Diop blurs them through a deft, intricate use of composition and depth of field, preferring to focus on the ways in which people interact with the art. Moments of wonder and contemplation, rather than likenesses of divine kings, are made magical via the soundtrack’s celestial orchestration of harps.  Dancing, learning, talking; breathing in the sultry coastal air of Benin—this is restitution’s life-giving force. Embracing that power, Dahomey retreats from a famous line by Chris Marker: “When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.” Marker’s fatalities might fill European art galleries and history books. But together with the film’s exultant, polyphonic voices, Diop affirms that culture elsewhere is, in fact, a botany of life.