On How Not to Accelerate in Reverse Gear.
Or, the Museum’s Troubled Futurity, Considered.

“Every museum is a time machine with multiple pedals for acceleration, all moving
only in reverse gear. Even a museum that addresses the contemporary immediately
transforms the present into a packaged relic, and then you exit through the gift shop,
again. This means that the museum of the future is somewhat of an oxymoron. A
time machine that moves only into the past can hardly be expected to have a future,
can it?“

In this essay, Raqs considers the museum as a site shaped by time, imagination, and potentiality. The text delves on the idea of the museum as a space that must continuously reconfigure its relationship to knowledge, affect, and public memory. Engaging with both historical inheritances and emergent desires, the essay imagines futures where the museum becomes a dynamic locus of encounter, rather than a repository of resolved meaning.

Text by Raqs, published in ‘The Museum of the Future: 43 New Contributions to the Debate on the Future of the Museum’, by the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Edited by Joachim Baur, 2020