Technology & Cultural Heritage — Open Data

Ex Situ — An Open Map of Looted Art and Displaced Cultural Artifacts

A fully open-source platform now indexes more than 100,000 looted and displaced objects in world museums, plotting each one back to the soil, temple, and community it was taken from.

• Over 100,000 artifacts from the world's major collections are now mapped to their places of origin on an interactive globe.
• The project pulls data automatically from open museum APIs — currently eight collections including the Metropolitan Museum, the V&A, and the Berlin SMB.
• It is self-hosted and AGPL-3.0 open source: any city, researcher, or descendant community can run their own instance.

For most of the past century, the geography of looted cultural property has been hidden inside individual museum catalogs, academic databases, and decades of slow provenance research. Finding whether a particular object was displaced during colonial rule, war, or occupation has usually meant digging through a separate archive for each institution. Ex Situ inverts that workflow: instead of visiting the museum, it brings the museum's entire collection onto a single map centered on the object's origin.

The platform is built on a deliberately un-fancy stack. The front end is Next.js rendering an interactive globe with Deck.gl; a Strapi headless backend manages the records; and a Python ETL pipeline pulls, cleans, and matches data from the open-access APIs that major museums now publish. The result is a spatial index — each artifact carries coordinates, a museum holding it, and a link back to its region of origin. The design choice matters: by making the origin the center rather than the acquirer, the map reframes every object from a "collection highlight" into a point on a trail of displacement.

That reframing is the real mechanism here. Cultural restitution has been stuck in case-by-case adjudication for generations: one painting, one lawsuit, one committee. An open spatial index changes the scale of the problem, turning isolated claims into a visible pattern across continents and centuries. It is not a court, and it cannot return an object on its own, but it gives source communities and researchers a tool for seeing the shape of loss that no catalog alone can show. The project's open license is the final deliberate choice: a tool for tracing the world's displaced heritage is most useful when anyone, anywhere, can deploy and extend it.