At a time when several flights recently affected cultural institutions worldwide, UNESCO inaugurated, on September 29, 2025 at the World -AT -BARCELONE conference, its virtual museum of stolen objects. The project had been announced during the previous edition of this conference in 2022 by general manager Audrey Azoulay.
Designed by the architect Francis Kéré, this virtual museum has a gallery of objects sought on the Data of Interpol. This base has 57,000 cultural goods, 250 of which are currently available online, a number called to grow gradually. The identified objects cover all the geographic areas, historical periods and typologies.
The site is organized in three sections: an auditorium, the gallery of stolen objects and a gallery of reputable objects. The auditorium presents the project, the role of UNESCO and the issues related to the illicit trafficking of cultural goods. The gallery of stolen objects, the most supplied, allows research by category, region, period or color. We can also browse this section randomly and thus discover a statue of Korè, a commemorative medal of the National Assembly of Szecsény or even a rocky landscape painting with hermit, each visible on a virtual base, sharing via a link and addable to the favorites. The gallery of restitutions currently presents only three objects, including a trilobite and a fossilized shark tooth returned to Morocco in 2024. Each object is accompanied by notices detailing its historical journey.
A complementary menu allows you to find the selection of visitors, their favorites as well as UNESCO virtual exhibitions, under development. The device was designed to be accessible in virtual reality. Some reproductions were carried out using artificial intelligence.
The initiative thus aims to raise awareness and mobilize Internet users as relays in the research and restitution of cultural goods. It also makes it possible to federate the various actors involved: “We need a network – police forces, judicial authorities, art market, member states, civil society, communities – to defeat another network, that of organized crime”hammered Sunna Altnoder, the head of the unit in charge of the site. This was funded by Saudi Arabia up to 2.1 million euros.
