Museum of Black Futures

BF-17-39 Djuwa Mroivili: A Lullaby

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, theatre, text, fashion, hair design, and performance into a powerful artistic language.  You should also really look her up on this music streaming platform, cause she has released an amazing album together with bass player James Oesi. Together they spotlight overlooked composers from the African diaspora. She’s currently affiliated with the Production House of Theater Rotterdam, where she created I Vow To Distract Forever. A really cool performance that questions the rigid rules of the classical music world. In her upcomig project 'Mx. CoelaCunt will live forever' Djuwa explores ritual, queerness, and resistance in Comorian culture. For Djuwa, music is both memory and healing, can’t wait to unpack that with her. This podcasts sounds so crisp because of the hard work, dedication and friendship with Marcellino van Callias of La Fam Productions. Intro music is by Oshunmare. And the visuals are made by Illest Preacha.

BF-517-1 Billy Gerard Frank: Mining the Archive, Mind the Gap

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 free from Eurocentric paradigms. Today I'm having one of many conversations about the complexity of collecting with the one and only Billy Gerard Frank.  Billy Gérard Frank is, a Grenada-born and New York-based, multi-media artist, filmmaker, and modern-day abolitionist. With his research-driven practice, Billy dives into histories related to race, exile, global politics, and post-colonial and queer decoloniality. He challenges and deconstructs conventional narratives and uses speculation and new imagery to suggest counter-histories. This makes him such an influential voice in the creation of the Museum of Black Futures.  There's a slight typ-o in the captions! Billy was once part of the Art Students League, where he met John Hultberg. Shout out to the amazing Mame-Fatou Niang for introducing us to each other. This episode sounds amazing because of the hard work, dedication and friendship of Marcellino van Callias of La Fam Productions. The music is made by Oshunmare and samples from Baaghi The visuals are made by Illest Preacha

BF-63-18 Lelani Lewis: Ancestral Recipes

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 needs as it is the return of the sacred to the mother, the soil. It restores spiritual balance by reconnecting people, places, and traditions. It invites ritual and ceremony to create safe passage for what is being returned. This is where spiritual reparations comes in, coined in this podcast by Femi Dawkins: the preparation of our inner and collective worlds for restoration. It is about healing what cannot be repaid in money: the memory, the soul, and the togetherness. It is reconnecting the ties that were severed by displacement, colonial extraction, and cultural erasure. In this episode, we explore how these ideas take root in the work of chef, author, and food activist Lelani Lewis. Her cooking, her lectures, her writings, and her workshops return us to the produce of the soil, the sacred mother, in ways that transcend recipes. Her work draws us back to the ingredients, practices, and foodways that carry ancestral memory. It is a reminder that food is not just sustenance; it is ceremony, archive, and purpose. For us in the diaspora, engaging with these ingredients and traditions is a form of rematriation. It’s a return to the earth, to seed and soil, to the knowledge embedded in our bodies. And when we treat this as a living practice — when we cook together, share the table, pass on the methods — it becomes a form of spiritual reparations. It rebuilds connection, strengthens community, and creates a safe passage for culture itself to return. So what might this look like in The Museum of Black Futures? Can a museum be a place where you taste history? Where exhibitions are also meals, and where recipes are treated as heritage documents? Where the return of culture also happens on the tongue, in the body, and in the soil? In this conversation, we speculate on what it would mean to design a museum experience where food is its beating heart. A site where rematriation and spiritual reparations feed the imagination as much as the body. Production & Sound design: Marcellino van Callias with La Fam Productions Intro music: Oshunmare Visuals: Illest Preacha Trumpet: Peter Somuah Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/museumofblackfutures/

BF-462-9 Femi Dawkins: Spiritual Reparations

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 Haus der Kultur der Welt I was introduced to the concept of rematriation.  Rematriation restores spiritual balance and also creating a cultural context for the object, while being in the process of returning cultural property to its rightful owners. Or in its own terms, returning the property to its sacred to the mother. It recognizes that there must be ritual, ceremony, and a safe passage for these material to travel home. It centers repair, healing, community and yes, joy. This is where The Museum of Black Futures stands. We align with rematriation because it pushes decolonial action away from European systems and logic, and towards worldviews that hold space for the spiritual, the ceremonial, and the relational. For us, this is also where the concept of spiritual reparations comes in, a term coined by our friend and collaborator, artist and poet Femi Dawkins. Spiritual reparations is about healing what cannot be repaid in money or goods. It is restoration on the level of memory, soul, and community. Much of our heritage, our rituals, our stories, our objects, has been displaced, colonized, or erased. Spiritual reparations means reconnecting and reimagining those ties: creating new rituals, restoring old ones, and reweaving our communities. It is the spiritual preparation for the material return and repair. Clearing the way for actual reparations, systemic change, and the restitution of stolen African heritage. Spiritual reparations work forward as well as backward. Part of it is that future generations don’t just know where they come from, but they feel rooted in something greater than themselves. They inherit a new state of being, one that reshapes their relationship to institutions, resources, nations and citizenship itself. In this episode, we explore how rematriation and spiritual reparations intersect — and how they can shape a museum that is not only a repository of history, but a sanctuary for the future. Sound design and production: Marcellino van Callias of La Fam Productions Music by Oshunmare Trumpet by Peter Somuah Visuals by Illest Preacha

BF-220-14 Ingrid LaFleur: Unlocking Portals Within

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 transform within ourselves in order for us to really get this museum going. Cause a museums, as a Western concept are institutions of memory. Telling stories locked into a lineair timeline, of where a history, a movement or a genre once began, and where we are now. Museums often present timelines that historically celebrate the victor, keeping their legacies 'relevant' while erasing the stories of those they left behind.. or who threatens the relevance of the status quo. Traditionally these memories are structured, chaptered and controlled by a Eurocentric ethics of time and space. Can our museum use this reparations money to transcend the need to be validated by the frameworks of the status quo? Can we build a future that doesn’t rest on conquest, domination, or nostalgia for a past that never truly served us? But to do that, we must reject the colonial grip of linear time and instead, we embrace non-linear time, the fluidity of being, found in African mythology, cosmology, and spirituality.