Switzerland's Federal Office of Culture has awarded just under CHF 2 million — roughly $2.4 million — to fund provenance research across Swiss museums and collections, ARTnews reported on 2 October, following the office's own announcement on 29 September. Twenty-six projects will run from 2027 to 2028, selected from 30 applications submitted under a public call for proposals. The programme deliberately reaches beyond the usual provenance-research specialists: the open call was designed to draw in institutions with little prior experience in the field, reflecting Switzerland's decentralised cultural landscape, where responsibility for museums is divided among the confederation, cantons, municipalities, universities and private foundations. Funded projects will go beyond single-object studies to build systematic foundations — cataloguing and digitising hard-to-access archives, and carrying out first-pass assessments of entire collections to map where evidence exists and where gaps remain. The core focus is on objects acquired in colonial and archaeological contexts, alongside works potentially connected to Nazi persecution and looting. The office stresses that the research should lay the groundwork for further investigation and potential dialogue about restitution, with several projects run in collaboration with partner institutions and communities of origin rather than as purely domestic exercises. The announcement reflects Switzerland's complicated entanglement with colonial histories: the country held no colonies of its own, but Swiss organisations, companies and individuals participated in colonial systems. Among the awards, one headline project tasks nine museums with examining the provenance of more than 6,300 objects from Cameroon in their holdings — a case that has gained urgency since a 2024 visit by a Cameroonian delegation to several Swiss museums highlighted the need for the research.