This project addresses restitution and reparation through the unfolding of the historical narrative of London’s role as the epicenter of gold trade and colonial exploitation. While the British were extracting gold from its colonies and other conquered lands, they were constructing their metropole of London. The height of colonialism coinciding with the Industrial Revolution witnessed the rise of railway infrastructure, built on top of brick viaducts that were connected across England.

As part of the development of the metropole, the British Museum is benefitting from the exploitation of far away lands by acquiring looted objects from these places. They continue to accrue profits today using the objects they stole and exoticized to further create an imbalance between the British and their former colonies.

The intervention imagines the repurposing of viaducts - the symbol of the British empire - into spaces for restitution and a network for reconciliation. The reparation center manifests as a gold refinery factory which extracts the gold from the Bank of England underground vault to be used as reparations. The objects that have been processed with restitution and its related reparation to the origin will be raised above to the train level to be transported out of London. While infrastructure has often represented the development of empire due to colonial legacy and exploitation of distant lands, our project overturns that association through speculative forms of reparation to accompany restitution.