‘Provenance’ is not a place: rethinking the relationship between museums, artworks and local areas
Returning works of art periodically to the regions from which they originate is an idea that is intuitively appealing. The draft bill on regional promotion and the rotation of cultural heritage exhibits stems from an understandable need: to strengthen the relationship between heritage and local communities and to enable regions to reclaim works that currently belong to the collections of museums located elsewhere. But this very proposal raises a deeper question: where does a work of art really come from?
The question is not purely geographical. In museum studies and international research on provenance, a cultural object is not defined solely by the place where it was produced or discovered. Rather, it possesses a genuine ‘biography’: production, commissioning, use, changes of ownership, collecting, movements, museum acquisition, exhibitions and subsequent reinterpretations. The ‘object biography’ approach, which developed from the work of Igor Kopytoff and Arjun Appadurai (1986), focuses precisely on the transformation of the meanings and values that an object takes on as it moves through different places, eras and communities.
It is here that the Italian debate can converge with the international one. In 2026, ICOM devoted two issues of *Museum International* to provenance research. The focus is no longer merely on reconstructing who owned an object, but on understanding the circumstances of its acquisition, the power relations that accompanied its movements, and the various communities that can identify with its history. Provenance, in other words, does not necessarily pinpoint a single location on the map: it reconstructs a network of relationships.
From this perspective, automatically associating a work of art with a ‘territory of origin’ risks oversimplifying matters. What is the territory of a work commissioned in one city, created by an artist from another, intended for a building elsewhere, subsequently transferred to a dynastic collection and finally acquired by a national museum? And which stage of its history should take precedence over the others?
This is not an objection to the circulation of works. On the contrary. The mobility of collections can be an extraordinary tool for access, knowledge and the rebalancing of cultural provision. UNESCO itself calls for the promotion of cooperation between museums, exchanges, exhibitions and the mobility of collections, whilst at the same time recognising the fundamental role played by research, conservation and the interpretation of collections.
