Museum – UNESCO

On the occasion of the International Day against Illicit Trafficking in Cultural Property (14 November), let’s visit the UNESCO Virtual Museum of Stolen Cultural Objects, which opened its doors in Autumn 2025.

Three years after its announcement at MONDIACULT 2022, UNESCO has just launched the first global platform dedicated to stolen cultural property. The UNESCO Virtual Museum of Stolen Cultural Objects offers an immersive digital experience through the use of 3D and 2D modelling and virtual reality. The establishment of the museum aims to raise awareness of the importance of protecting cultural heritage and to provide information on how illicit trafficking of cultural property affects people and communities and undermines cultural rights.

The Virtual Museum will include cultural objects from all regions and of various types, ranging from manuscripts to sculptures and paintings, and from different periods of history. It will be in a constant state of evolution. Its collection will expand as new thefts are recorded and as objects are recovered and returned, with the successful stories being documented and made available to the public in the Return and Restitution Room.

The Virtual Museum will also feature narratives and testimonies from local communities affected by the loss, thus highlighting how the illicit trafficking of cultural property also leads to a loss of knowledge and skills, and a weakening of the links with history and tradition that are essential for maintaining the dynamism and diversity of our cultural expressions.

Bonus Trivia!

For the first version of the Virtual Museum, the objects are selected among those listed in the INTERPOL Stolen Works of Art Database, the only international database of certified police information on stolen and missing art objects.

Francis Kéré, a renowned architect from Burkina Faso and the laureate of the 2022 Pritzker Architecture Prize, was tasked with the conceptualisation of the Virtual Museum. The museum is inspired by a baobab tree, emphasising cultural property as the “roots” of communities, without which rituals and culture are diminished.

Click here to immerse yourself in the newly opened museum.

Sources and images taken from: https://www.unesco.org/en/culture-and-digital-technologies/virtual-museum

Image No 1: Visualisation of the ramp of the Museum, © 2023 Kéré Architecture GmbH, All rights reserved

Image No 2: Sketches for the museum’s architecture by © 2023 Kéré Architecture GmbH, All rights reserved

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