Museum of Black Futures

How can the Museum of Black Futures truly embody reparations? What is reparation? What does it consist of? How does it feel? Our good friend Djuwa Mroivili weighs in on these questions. Djuwa is an interdisciplinary artist and performer based in Amsterdam. With a background in classical piano, she graduated from ArtEZ in 2021 and has since developed a distinctive practice that blends music, theatr...

One of the most complex aspects is its collection and archive. The act of collecting and archiving has been such a significant characteristic of colonial extraction. It was used as a way of capturing something colonists find useful or profitable and erasing that which doesn’t serve their narrative. However, for us, it has the potential to become a powerful tool to reclaim our stories and break fre...

When we speak of repatriation , we often think about cultural objects, sacred items, artifacts, and heritage returning to the communities that they once belonged to. In its fullest sense, repatriation is about more than the material. That’s why the term rematriation was introduced: to move it away from paternal connotations and pay homage to the cultural context and care that the material culture...

In Western museum lingo, the return of cultural property is called “repatriation.” It’s a signed agreement, a logistical operation, a deal between governments, a transaction. In that frame, the focus is on the legal process, the paperwork and the political, dyplomatic value of material culture. But for many Indigenous communities the return is much more than that. While visiting a conference at Ha...

Ingrid LaFleur is a cultural strategist, futures researcher, Afrofuture theorist, and pleasure activist dedicated to fostering equitable and just futures. As the founder of The Afrofuture Strategies Institute (TASI), she merges foresight methodologies with the cultural movement of Afrofuturism to cultivate Afrofuture consciousness and inspire transformative action.  And there's a lot we need to tr...

One day, our bodies will no longer be battlegrounds. Every ghost we name, every memory we claim, loosens the grip of history. Break free. Repair. Heal. The Museum of Black Futures will exist. In this episode we meet the amazing South-African soprano Ashley Stapelfeldt. She calls upon our spiritual healing by singing the spiritual Balm in Gilead. With this beautiful song she introduces Kimberley Sm...

Western museums are institutions of linear history — telling stories that follow a victor’s timeline, celebrating conquest while erasing those left behind. They are structured, chaptered, and controlled by Eurocentric ethics of time and space. Can our museum reject the constraints of the colonial grip of linear time and Eurocentric definitions and instead root itself in non-linear time, in the hyb...

The Museum of Black Futures began as a thought experiment. A satirical “what if” that quickly became something serious. We imagined what would happen if the debts of colonial exploitation, trafficking, and slavery were finally paid — and if we decided to invest our share in building the museum of our dreams. Not a museum that fits inside the walls of white institutions, but one rooted in our own t...