Museumnacht × Museum of Black Futures
With performance, music, visual art and storytelling, we explore the archives our bodies carry, as well as the forces that preserve us.
This year, we declare: The Archive Is Alive!
An archive does not live solely in documents, display cases or boxes of acid-free paper. It lives in bodies, voices, rhythms, alter egos, desires and stories that continue to haunt and resonate across generations. Some pages are missing. Some stories were never written down. A gap in the archive can be a loss, but it can also be an opening: a space where imagination enters.
During Museumnacht, six artists set living archives in motion.
The Archive Is Alive. Let's unbox it.
Festival Museumnacht Amsterdam
Location The Bookshop
Duration Ongoing programme from 7:00 PM to 2:00 AM
Genre Event
Free admission with a Museumnacht wristband, or register for free via the website.
7:30 PM and 10:30 PM
Zaïre Krieger
From the work of Zaïre Krieger (1995) emerges a call for justice, love, and the freedom to be more than one thing at once. Earlier this year, she published her poetry collection Chameleon, in which she explores what it means to create a place of your own and to fully embrace your multidimensional self. During Museum Night, her blue-scaled, extraterrestrial, foul-mouthed alter ego Zireïa takes over, introducing us to other versions of Zaïre that resist easy categorization.
She is joined by theatre maker and pianist Djuwa Mroivili (1998), who remixes music, words, and movement into her own distinctive form of storytelling. Perhaps Djuwa’s underwater alter ego Mx. CoelaCunt will also make an appearance: a glittering hybrid being who is at once fish, human, auntie, ancestor, god, archive, and griot, and who has always preferred to remain elusive and undocumented.
Perhaps that is why you have not met Mx. CoelaCunt yet.
But Mx. CoelaCunt knows you.
Because Mx. CoelaCunt knows everything.
You’ve been warned.
8:30 PM and 12:30 AM
Kyara Harley
Singer Kyara Harley is not only a performer but also a world builder. Inspired by her love of fashion, ballroom culture and music, she transforms The Bookshop into The Mothership during Museumnacht: a world where femininity, Blackness, queerness and radical imagination take centre stage, and where collective energy invites everyone to move along.
Her music carries the legacies of George Clinton, Sun Ra, Grace Jones, Earth, Wind & Fire and Janet Jackson, alongside influences from house, techno and pop.
At the heart of The Mothership is her hit song “Activate”, Kyara’s explosive empowerment Pride anthem. Driven by heavy drums, pumping bass and ballroom attitude, it is a call to the girls, the gays and their allies: take up space, move loudly, and refuse to be erased.
9:30 PM and 11:30 PM
Foxy Roxy
London-born performer Roxanne Pratt, also known as Foxy Roxy, uses pole dance, twerking, heels and body language as forms of storytelling. Drawing on her Sierra Leonean and Zimbabwean heritage, she approaches the body as a living archive: a place where knowledge, memories, rhythms, sensuality, joy and resilience are stored and passed on.
Her performance is therefore not only a way of telling stories, but also a form of archiving in itself. Through movement, Foxy Roxy brings this embodied memory back to life, transforming the stage into a ceremonial space for transformation, softness, strength and freedom
Ongoing
Mural
Throughout the night, a mural will gradually come to life as Museumnacht unfolds around it. The design engages in a dialogue with the history of the theatre and the traces of the Amsterdam residents who once entered the building through The Bookshop. Over the course of the evening, the painting grows into a new archival piece: a tangible testament to the fact that this night took place.
For bookworms and eager listeners aged 6 and up, we present The Bookshop Kids! Every first Sunday of the month, we transform our soft‑pink Bookshop into a place full of children’s stories where imagination has all the space it needs.
