"I've been collecting repatriation data for nearly 20 years, and I thought it should be a public database," the founder of Mola, Jason Felch, tells The Art Newspaper. "It's a labour of love for me." Felch was a longtime investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times and a co-author of the 2011 book Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World's Richest Museum (about the J. Paul Getty Museum). "I was writing about repatriation all the time and wanted to go from the anecdotal to analysing data and understanding trend lines," he says.
The phenomenon has even leaked into popular culture in recent years, with everything from the art world's from the 2018 blockbuster movie Black Panther to a of the comedian John Oliver's HBO series Last Week Tonight addressing the need for more aggressive repatriation policies.
It's about disrupting trafficking networks and making it more difficult for them to operate. This is where the Mola platform comes in-a new digital platform that traces not only the histories of specific repatriated objects but also compiles metadata in order to better understand smuggling networks and the museum industry's intensifying repatriation efforts.
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