The Humanitarian Politics of Return and Repair in Tigray: The Return of the Axum Obelisk.

The video installation The Return of the Axum Obelisk (2009) by Theo Eshetu, originally commissioned by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), serves as a context for examining the removal of this funerary stele from the Tigray region in northern Ethiopia in 1937, and its return, reinstallation, and unveiling at Axum in 2008. Eshetu's work deploys a narrative of repair and hope by demonstrating how the return of the obelisk lends itself to a newly found comradeship between Ethiopian and Italian engineers, among others, in association with UNESCO. The discussion culminates with an examination of how the repatriation effort reckons with the recent civil war in the Tigray region (2020–22), and considers the ambivalent nature of techno-scientific archeological projects. It asks whether cultural repatriation associated with the Italian colonial legacy is a meaningful reparative project in relation to deadly ethnic divisions associated with contemporary civil conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]