Coming soon
The artwork's digital passport
A Passport opened in the studio that grows with every stage of the work's life: exhibition, loan, restoration, sale. Each stage, each document can be sealed and timestamped to a qualified standard: its date and its integrity become legally opposable.
What the seal establishes
A legal presumption as to the date of the sealed document and to its integrity: it has not been altered since it was sealed. The burden of proof is reversed: it falls to the party challenging the document to prove otherwise.
What the seal does not establish
- The authenticity of the work.
- The truthfulness of the information declared.
- Any title of ownership over the work.
A work passes through many hands. Its file should follow it.
Every stage in the life of a work produces documents: studio documentation, inventory records, condition reports, deeds of sale. They scatter, they go missing, and they end up pieced back together too late, from fragments. The Passport gathers them as they come, each sealed on its own date.
The studio
The artist is the only person who knows what the work is: materials, dimensions, intent, successive states, what counts and what was only a step along the way. Sealing that documentation in their lifetime fixes their own version, dated. After them, it will be reconstructed by others.
The gallery
Inventory, consignments, hangings, loans granted. Each documented movement enriches the work's file instead of sitting in an internal spreadsheet.
The collector
The sale, sealed: who declared what, on what date, with which supporting documents. It is the link most often missing from a provenance, and the most expensive to reconstruct years later.
The foundation, the museum
The institution receives a file already assembled rather than a collection still to be documented. Loans, condition reports, succession and restitution build on what has already been established and dated.
The value of the file that travels with a work depends on what was documented thirty years earlier, in the studio. That is why the Passport opens at the beginning of the work's life, not at the end, and why it is handed on and keeps growing.
A file that grows without ever being rewritten
Each stage is sealed separately
A condition report, a deed of sale, an inventory record: each stage can produce a self-contained sealed document, dated, verifiable on its own, valid without time limit.
The Passport holds the index
The Passport is itself a sealed document referencing each stage by its cryptographic fingerprint. It is re-sealed with every addition, without ever altering the stages already sealed.
Each version points back to the previous one
Successive versions of the Passport are chained together. A stage removed from the file leaves a visible break in the chain.
The Passport does not only prove what it contains. It proves that nothing is missing from it.
A plain PDF, verifiable anywhere
Verifiable without account or software
The sealed document opens and verifies in any standard document reader. Verifying requires no account, no application, no platform.
Independent of us
The validity of the document depends neither on a platform, nor on Markellia, nor on any continuing commercial relationship.
Preserved for the long term
The sealed document and its seal are preserved by the qualified chain of trust for approximately seventy years.
Qualified seal and timestamp
The electronic seal and the timestamp are issued by Swisscom Trust Services, a qualified trust service provider under the European eIDAS Regulation and Swiss federal law (ZertES).
A file that travels, confidentiality that stays
A Passport passes through several successive holders. The service is built on a simple principle: each decides what to make visible, and to whom.
The holder keeps control of access
Opening the file to a buyer, an insurer or an institution remains the holder's decision, taken file by file.
Share without exposing everything
Disclosure may cover the complete file, or only the demonstration that the chain is unbroken and that no stage has been removed.
Markellia exposes nothing
No inventory, no collection and no holder name is published or made accessible to third parties.
For institutions and foundations
A collection is rarely documented at the moment it should be. The Passport gives a dated foundation to what already exists.
The documented collection
A sealed file work by work: declared holding, condition, supporting documents. A dated reference point to which later additions attach.
Loans and movements
Condition reports sealed on the way in and on the way out. Date and content are fixed for both parties, with no change of tool or format.
Succession and continuity
Documentation assembled during the artist's lifetime prepares the continuity of the estate and the handover to the structure that will take over.
Restitution
Provenance research produces documents. Sealing fixes what has been established, and the date on which it was.
Offer the Passport to your artists and members
Gallery, foundation, association, federation: offer the Passport to those you represent. For a gallery it is even the first step — opening the Passport with the artist, in the studio, while the documentation still exists. Markellia operates the registry and has each stage sealed by a qualified trust service provider; you keep the relationship with your artists and members.
Discuss a partnershipThe service opens in September 2026
A small pilot cohort of founding participants is being assembled: artists, galleries and institutions putting the service to the test in real conditions before its commercial launch.