Museum of Black Futures: Radical Space Station (2025)

Richard Kofi
Nov 1
3 min read

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.

Our Radical Space Station is inspired by the legacy of Edward Mukuka Nkoloso, the Zambian dreamer who, in the 1960s, set out to train the first African astronauts. A science teacher by day and director of Zambia’s National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy, Nkoloso taught his students to envision themselves among the stars. This dream of his began after his first airplane flight. When the pilot refused to stop the plane so he could walk on the clouds, Nkoloso decided to create his own launch one that would lift imagination itself and defy the rules of gravity.

Femi Dawkins ITA is housed in the Amsterdamse Schouwburg, a building where the history of power, culture, and trade is still palpable. Tonight, we turned that perspective around. Through live painting, poetry, and presence, Femi Dawkins addressed the ghosts that linger between walls of the International Theatre Amsterdam. His words moved through haunting and healing. His performance was an awakening, perhaps. A ritual of re-memory and a much needed exorcism.

Roxanne Pratt & Serge Kponton

Foxy Roxy (Roxanne Pratt) reimagined pole dance as a ritual of power, sensuality, and reclamation. Drawing from her Sierra Leonean and Zimbabwean roots, she transforms movement into a sacred act of healing and resistance.

Her performance for The Museum of Black Futures channels the resilience of women who move through extractive worlds: from Zimbabwe’s gold mines to the hidden chambers of the body itself. Here, the body becomes an archive of survival and spirit, rewriting what freedom feels like.

For this performance she collaborated with photographer, body artist and painter Serge Kponton. His visual language is based on the experience of years of field research in global body art traditions, now strengthening the visual power of Roxanne's story.

Myra Fanta Bodian & State OFFF

Theatre and film director Myra Fanta Bodian joined forces with DJ and producer STATE OFFF to create a performance inspired by the Bukut initiation rituals of Casamance, Senegal. In these Bukut ceremonies, participants step into the Forêt Sacrée, the sacred forest, to shed what is known and receive ancestral knowledge passed down through the generations.

Bodian guided us through a similar threshold of transformation, while STATE OFFF channels the pulse of the forest through gqom: a sound he doesn’t treat as a genre but as a weapon. Raw, percussive, and unrelenting.

Together they forge a ritual, a rite of passage between tradition and the futures still waiting to be imagined.magined.

Roxanne Palmas & GLTTR GDDSS

Although they were not formally collaborating on stage, there was a lot of synchronicity between the performances of comedian and storyteller Raquel Palmas and dj GLTTR GDDSS.

Raquel Palmas turned the stage into a living memory. Storytelling, singing, rapping, dancing all in conversation with her grandmother. In a touching story she explained how every time she makes coffee, she thinks of her. And that night, we all did too.

GLTTR GDDSS took that same energy and turned DJ-ing into performance art: a three-part journey of becoming, from innocence to radical authenticity. From rhythm to revelation. From self-doubt to self-love.

Both artists grounded their work in the voices of their matriarchs, the women who taught them to speak louder, love harder, and never apologize for taking up space.

Very interesting contributions to this vibrant night, cause sometimes the future sounds like your grandmother’s voice note or your mom's lullaby.