Maria Thereza Alves

 
Land
Recipes for Survival
Communal
Destabilizers
Birds
Seeing you
Water
Utopia
We
Borders
Plants
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Fair Trade Head

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Fair Trade Head, 2007

2 Lambda-prints, each 100x100 cm

The French government refused to return a tattooed Maori head held in the collection of the Museum of Natural History in Rouen declaring it “an artifact of the French cultural patrimony”. Through this work, Alves enables the fair exchange of heads between the indigenous groups whose descendants are being denied the return of their ancestor’s body parts with citizens of countries who are holding these body parts through a symbolic proxy of their heads to be held by the Maori until the French government returns all body parts in their collections.

--- This work is also part of: Museum of European Normality, 2008

also part of: