The Museum of Black Futures is a traveling art and heritage station that works with performance, ritual, music, and podcasts to imagine new futures. And during the Museumnacht Amsterdam, The Museum of Black Futures took over The Bookshop at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam. We center Afrofuturism, the imagination of Black Futures, and seek a state of zero colonial gravity. Together, we've turned the theatre into our own Radical Space Station.

During this evening filled with performance and conversation, we have transformed Theater aan de Rijn into our museum for the night. Our theme? Returning to the Sacred Mother. Together, we explored how we can reverse the Door of No Return — through exhibitions, artworks, and museum practices that help us imagine new futures. A form of reparations that goes beyond financial compensation, one in which we ourselves are in charge.

In the theatre performance Bling! Ngaba depicts the Cullinan’s journey home to South Africa. With a personification of the diamond, flickering images from the future and monologues from a court, she takes you from the early 19th century to today’s South Africa. She takes the audience into an alternative history and future. In the process, she seeks the answer to the question: by returning this diamond, can the UK heal all the scars of the past?

We live in a time of fake news, gaslighting and deception by government leaders and popular media, but we also wear masks in our daily lives. Why are we so afraid of the truth? And what happens when we create the conditions for honesty and openness? For Radical Space, author Clarice created a work in progress, called Salon Verité - Under the Dragon's Blood Tree. She turned ITA's Bookshop-stage into a space where truth and art meet.

In 1595, two teenage boys were taken from Madagascar by Dutch traders on their first expedition to Asia. The traders renamed them Lourens and Madagascar. These boys became the first known enslaved individuals trafficked by what would later become the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Journalist Leendert van der Valk unearthed their story in the archives. Writer Clarice Gargard transformed Leendert’s findings into a powerful new theatre text.