Possible Possibles

What is the Present Tense of Hope?

At the RCMC, the flagship research institute of the Wereldmuseum, we have always been oriented toward the future. Our work is committed to contributing to the realisation of a more just and equitable world. Rather than clinging to optimism, or a belief that the world we would like to see will materialise, we have instead understood our task as one of doing the necessary work despite all the difficulties entailed by persistent coloniality, insidious racism and extractive practices that maintain our inequitable reality. The intensifying climate crisis and persistent xenophobia towards people hailing from places outside of the north Atlantic, that which has been conceived of broadly as the “West”, has landed the world and our connection to one another in peril. And it is precisely this sense of inhospitality, of insularity, that has profound bearing on what we consider to be the core purpose of the RCMC and our hopes for the future.

A key part of our practice is to convene conversations with scholars, curators, artists and activists from across the world. We do this in order to engage with perspectives from beyond the Wereldmuseum, and beyond the Netherlands. Being a museum of world cultures means that we frequently work together with people whose lands and cultures have been exploited and erased, people from places that have been colonised, who are grappling with the afterlives of slavery and the countless campaigns to bring about the extinction of Indigenous communities and their practices. Our present moment of increased precarity leads us to reflect seriously on what it means to host those with whom we wish to converse and from whom we wish to learn. In this reflection, we struggled with the impossibility of hospitality, the power dynamics implicit when we ask people to come to an erstwhile colonial power that today lies at the heart of a Europe feverishly closing ranks. For one thing, simply the chore of having to obtain visas means that we are burdening our guests not only with an arduous process, but also to be subjected to the regimes of a hostile border police. With this in mind, we were compelled to ask ourselves whether such invitations are still ethical, and what an ethics of hospitality would look like in a moment of diminishing hope.

Yet, despite the pervading and growing sense of uselessness, we refuse to give in to a lack of hope. Indeed, we want our programming for 2025 and 2026 to signal this refusal. In this intention, we draw on the ways in which people have had to create liveability in innumerable impossible contexts. For countless generations, our ancestors and our elders have had no choice but to find the means to abide in their present moments, moments marked by extreme oppression. Cognizant of how people have been fighting for and working towards spaces to live and be together, we realised that while we cannot relinquish hope, we do need to rethink what we mean when we use the term. As a word, ‘hope’ is conventionally understood to point to the future, and thus seems always to exceed our grasp. Would it be possible then to think what ‘hope’ would be if we made it about the now, if we asked, ‘what is the present tense of hope?’

In 2025-26, the RCMC wants to reframe the notion of ‘hope’ so that it no longer only denotes “the future”. We want to seek out and give a platform to those practices that carve out pockets of liveable and hospitable spaces within the ones that already exist. We want to find the spaces where we can create joy and counteract exhaustion. Ours is not a project of optimism, but one of recognizing that there is no choice but to forge ahead. We will not be backing away from our practices of hosting, but instead deepen them, focusing on what is needed in the now, and how we can facilitate - in this moment - at the RCMC and the Wereldmuseum.