The Congolese Plantation Workers Art League (CATPC), an artist collective based at a plantation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has released a toolkit titled "Seven Easy Steps for Museums to Liberate the Plantations that Funded Them." The toolkit urges major museums—including London's Tate Britain, Cologne's Ludwig Museum, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven—to acknowledge and rectify their historical reliance on plantation wealth and exploited labor. CATPC presented the toolkit at a restitution conference at the Wereldmuseum in Amsterdam, organized with the Mondriaan Fund. The collective, founded in 2014, creates art from chocolate and has exhibited internationally, including at the 2024 Venice Biennale and the 2017 Armory Show.
This matters because CATPC directly challenges museums to move beyond symbolic gestures of restitution and diversity toward material, cultural, and ecological liberation for the communities whose labor historically financed these institutions. By identifying specific museums' founding ties to plantations—such as Henry Tate's sugar fortune and Peter Ludwig's chocolate factory—the toolkit forces a reckoning with the ongoing economic legacies of colonialism and exploitation in the art world. It also amplifies the voices of plantation workers as artists and activists, reframing restitution not just as returning objects but as redistributing power and resources.