Wallpaper artwork “Four Futuristic R’s” by the Belgian artist-activist collective Own Up To It! acquired by the European Museum of Restitution in 2035
PROVENANCE:
The wallpaper artwork entitled Four Futuristic R’s was created by the Belgian artist-activist collective Own up to it! in January 2021. Own up to it!, an all white Belgian collective consisting of 10 members with backgrounds in the arts and political activism, formed in 2019 out of a sense of shared exasperation with the slowness of their government to take accountability for their violent colonial past. The central visions of the collective in their various artistic and activistic works were to self-critically reflect their own white privilege, to contribute towards making reparations for the violent colonial legacy inherited from their forebears and to demand that the Belgian government and monarchy take responsibility for their colonial involvement in a pro-active way.
In late 2020 Own Up to It! formed an alliance with a diverse group of Belgian anti-colonial artist and activist collectives in response to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations held all over Belgium in solidarity with riots in the USA that were unleashed by the tragic death of George Floyd, an African-American, at the hands of brutal white American police. In June 2020 demonstrations were held all over Belgium, from Antwerp to Brussels, Ghent to Ostende, demanding that the Belgian government take responsibility for their violent colonial past and demanding the removal of public monuments glorifying King Leopold II, whose reign of colonizing terror in Congo had led to some of the most brutal colonial violence ever perpetrated by European colonial imperialism.
In mid June 2020, as momentum in the movement demanding the Leopold II statues grew, a young black Belgian Congolese activist initiated a civil action campaign of petitions demanding removal called Reparons L’Histoire (Let’s Repair History), which immediately went viral on social media and gained Belgian and International attention to the cause. Own Up to It! formed an alliance working alongside Reparons L’Histoire, as well as with numerous local active anti-colonial movements, to exert maximum pressure on the Belgian government. The alliance, called Healing in Safety, shared a common vision of the need to heal the wounds of the Belgian colonial legacy by confronting not only the visibility of public monuments glorifying brutal former colonizing monarchs but also the contemporary legacy of racism connected to it in Belgian society. Reparons L’Histoire was so successful in exerting pressure on the Belgian government that all monuments of Leopold II were eventually removed from Belgian civic spaces in November of 2020.
Inspired by the coming together of the Healing in Safety alliance, Own Up to It! produced the Four Futuristic R’s artwork in January 2021 to reflect the need for exerting continuous pressure on the Belgian government to put their money where their mouth was and pay reparations to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi for their colonial atrocities. The collective purposely used synthwave graphics and clip art from the early 80s electronic-video game scene in creating the aesthetic for Four Futuristic R’s so as to express their impatience with the slowness of their society to take accountability for their past. By employing earlier sci-fi futuristic graphics to exert their demands for a future focused on healing and reconciliation, Own Up to It! made explicit to Belgians that the white-washing of history and white Belgian denial of the colonial past was no longer an option and critical self-reflection and responsibility was urgently needed. The Healing in Safety alliance grew in number over the following years, representing a concerted effort of black, white and POC Belgians to work together towards Belgium’s reconciliation with its colonial history.
HISTORY:
The Four Futuristic R’s wallpaper was originally installed in January 2021 on a public billboard in Brussels near to where one of the Leopold II monuments had been removed in November 2020. Own Up to It! rented the billboard for the entirety of 2021 and afterwards at the beginning of 2022 it was acquired by the Africa Museum in Tervuren, which had a long racist, colonial institutional history and had only renovated its highly problematic displays in 2020. After the events of 2020 the museum sought to self-reflect further on its own past and its role in propagating Belgian glorification of its colonial empire by integrating some of the removed Leopold II monuments into its displays. The Four Futuristic R’s wallpaper was installed as a backdrop to one of the removed monuments in the museum over the course of the following 2 years in order to provoke continual reflection on the need for Belgian accountability for its colonial legacy.
The Healing in Safety alliance grew over the same period into a force to be reckoned with and continued vociferously demanding the restitution of cultural heritage from Belgian museum collections to their countries of origin, the unconditional repatriation of any ancestral remains held in Belgium as well as exerting pressure on the government to pay reparations to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi, all of whom had been colonised by the Belgian state. By the time the European-wide Restitution Agreement came into legislative effect in 2024, Belgium had begun to transform itself from being one of the slowest European countries to confront its colonial past to one that was increasingly progressive in moving towards full responsibility for its colonial heritage, due also in no uncertain amount to the work of the Healing in Safety alliance. In 2025, the Belgian government officially apologised to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi for their brutal colonisation and initiated legislation to move towards a meaningful reconciliation involving financial compensation for the past.
By 2034, the same year as the inauguration of the European Museum of Restitution, Belgium joined Germany in becoming the first European countries to issue substantial reparations to countries formerly oppressed under their colonial control. In 2035 the European Museum of Restitution acquired the Four Futuristic R’s from the renamed Belgian Reconciliation Museum (formerly the Africa Museum) in Tervuren for it’s own collection.
CURRENT DISPLAY:
In the present display at the European Museum of Restitution, the Four Futuristic R’s is housed in the Healing Room. The Healing Room is an installation developed by the museum to document the history of the European wide restitution movement over the course of the 2020s and 2030s. Housed within an immersive green light, the spatial installation uses chromatic strategies to encourage a sensory effect of healing on viewers entering the space. Enhanced by mirrors reflecting the space back onto itself, the display also centres around objects of significant cultural heritage that were restituted to their countries of belonging over the course of the 2020s and 2030s by European colonising countries. Integrating the Four Futuristic R’s wallpaper work into the space to reflect on the Belgian experience of disentangling from its colonial legacy, as well as the Own Up to It! collective’s involvement in the Healing in Safety alliance’s work that pushed for Belgian accountability for its colonialism, the Healing Room also houses copies of objects restituted to Mali, Australia, Colombia and Nigeria by France, Switzerland, Germany and Britain.
European Museum of Restitution 