ARC @ World Voices Festival 2026
New York, NY
Wednesday, 26 April 2026 | 6:30 PM – 7:45 PM
AIA New York | Center for Architecture – Tafel Hall
536 LaGuardia Pl, New York, NY 10012
In a conversation moderated by ARC Executive Director, Julie Trébault, titled “Geographies of Extraction: Loss, Power, and Cultural Rematriation,” three writers ask: what do the journeys of human remains, cultural artifacts, and iconic artworks reveal about our history? What makes the violence and asymmetries that have shaped their extraction, preservation, and return both collective and deeply personal experiences?
It was on a tour of the British Museum years ago that Mohegan theater artist Madeline Sayet (Where We Belong) discovered a collection of Native American skulls—objects the museum classified as artifacts, but which she understood as ancestors, alive with the yearning to return home. In Gabriela Wiener’s irreverently witty novel, Undiscovered (tr. Julia Sanches), the Peruvian writer is confronted by her complicated family colonial heritage in a museum in Paris when she discovers the man responsible for pillaging these pre-Columbian artifacts was her own great-great-grandfather. In Who Owns Beauty? (tr. Andrew Brown), French art historian Bénédicte Savoy, whose work has fundamentally reshaped debates on provenance, museums, and cultural restitution, asks us to examine how great works of art collected in Western museums came to be there.
Speakers
Madeline Sayet
Madeline Sayet is a Mohegan director, playwright, and scholar who believes the stories we pass down shape our collective possible futures. Her accolades include being named a MacDowell Fellow, Hermitage Fellow, TED Fellow, MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow, Native American NCAIED 40 Under 40, Connecticut Magazine 40 Under 40, and a recipient of the White House Champion of Change Award from President Obama. She is a resident artist at Centre Theatre Group in Los Angeles and a member of Long Wharf Theatre’s artistic ensemble. As both a Shakespearean director and scholar, she serves as Clinical Associate Professor in the English Department at Arizona State University with the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS). She served six years as Executive Director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program (YIPAP), where she ran an annual new Native play festival and created programming to uplift the next generation of Native theatre artists.
Bénédicte Savoy
Bénédicte Savoy is professor of modern art history at Technische Universität Berlin. From 2016 to 2021, she also held a chair at the Collège de France, focusing on the cultural history of European art heritage (18th–20th century). Her research covers museum history, French-German cultural transfer, Nazi-looted art, and postcolonial provenance research.
In 2018, she co-authored the report On the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage with the Senegalese scholar Felwine Sarr, commissioned by French President Emmanuel Macron. Savoy has received numerous awards, including the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (2016) and the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing (2024).
She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, a Knight of the French Legion of Honour, and serves on various boards. Her recent publications include Africa’s Struggle for Its Art and Who Owns Beauty, which received the European Essay Prize in 2025.
Gabriela Wiener
Gabriela Wiener is one of the essential voices of contemporary Latin American literature in the diaspora. A Peruvian writer, poet, and chronicler based in Spain, she has turned the body into a political and narrative territory. Her work questions the fictions of power, patriarchy, colonialism, and the mandates of heteronormativity and whiteness as systems of thought.
Through a hybrid, de-generated, autofictional writing shaped by memory and resistance, she transforms intimate experience—desire, motherhood, family, migration—into a critical mirror of social structures. In her novel Huaco retrato, she rewrites her family genealogy to confront racism, and in Atusparia she explores the political memories of the past in search of new revolutionary possibilities.
Her first gonzo journalism stories appeared in the narrative journalism magazine Etiqueta Negra. She is also the author of the nonfiction books Sexografías, Nueve Lunas, Llamada perdida, and Dicen de mí, and the poetry collections Ejercicios para el endurecimiento del espíritu and Una pequeña fiesta llamada Eternidad. She received her country’s National Journalism Prize for a story about gender-based violence in the literary world.
Undiscovered, the English translation of her novel Huaco retrato, was a finalist for the 2024 International Booker Prize, the PEN America award, and the 2025 Rómulo Gallegos Prize. Her novel Atusparia won the Ciutat de Barcelona Prize for Best Book in Spanish.
Moderator
Julie Trébault
Julie Trébault is the Founder and Executive Director of ARC — Artists at Risk Connection, a global organization dedicated to safeguarding artistic freedom and supporting artists and cultural workers under threat. Under her leadership, ARC provides critical resources and support to more than 2,100 artists in more than 60 countries facing persecution from state and non-state actors, empowering them to overcome challenges to their creative expression. Prior to founding ARC, she served as director of public programs at the Museum of the City of New York and the Center for Architecture.
