The year is 2165.
A global wave of reparatory actions and initiatives occurring over the past 125 years has led to a world transformed into a place of healing. A world where Black and Indigenous communities have had meaningful and lasting opportunities for repair.
In this future, Black and Indigenous people are afforded the opportunity to repair relationships with themselves, their communities, systems of governance and economics, the land, the cosmos, and their ancestors and descendants yet to be born.
Intelligent Mischief in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood invites guests into this imagined place during “Future of Repair,” an exhibition–a social dream space–exploring reparations and collective healing. Guided in part by virtual world building sessions hosted by the organization in which the public was invited to imagine a future where reparations as a policy has already happened and given way to a culture of repair, six leading Afrofuturist artists envision 2165 Earth.
“When people walk in, they’re immediately offered a cup of tea; we developed six tea blends that map to these world building sessions that we created,” Aisha Shillingford, Intelligent Mischief artistic director, told Forbes.com. “People are invited to sit down, have some tea, and then they are invited to listen to a guided meditation that provides an entry into the world that we imagine these artifacts exist within. The meditation is about 20 minutes, then we invite them to explore the space. Touch the art that is open to being touched. There are sonic installations, videos, an altar they can interact with and leave something behind on. Each work invites you to sit for a while.”
This is no white cube gallery in Chelsea. Curators want visitors to spend time. Engage.
“As (guests) enter our space, they basically enter into a new a new world,” Shillingford said. “We were interested in embodiment and how participating in the art helps to transform the way we feel and think and how it feels like a more complete experience versus feeling separated and feeling like you’re trying to guess what the artist means.”
Throughout the run of the presentation, through March of 2026, Intelligent Mischief will be hosting special artist presentations and poetry readings, guided dreaming, imagination and meditation, collaborative art making events, restorative yoga and somatics, reparations clinics, and more as part of the exhibition. The primary social dream space is open to the public Thursday through Sunday from 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM with reservations required. Off-hours arrangements for visiting can be made through Intelligent Mischief. Visiting is free with a suggested donation.
Reparations
Mention of the word “reparations” typically leads to apoplectic fits of mania and near spontaneous combustion among right wing Americans. This stems from the concept of reparations in the popular consciousness being flattened to mean checks for Black people making up for the harms of slavery. This ignores the long history of reparations in America, reparations that have included monetary payouts. That was the case with the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 when then-President Ronald Reagan signed a bill providing $1.2 billion ($20,000 a person) and an apology to each of the approximately 60,000 living Japanese-Americans who had been interned during World War II. Straight cash homie. Arch-conservative Ronald Reagan acknowledging that a grievous wrong had been done to these people, by the American government, and making some small measure of amends along with the Congress.
Victims of the notorious Tuskegee syphilis “study” were also awarded a cash settlement–reparations–from the American government for their unwitting “participation” in the barbaric science experiment.
Reparations have happened before, they can happen again.
Precedents exist.
Reparations needn’t be limited to money. Reparations can come in the form of apologies, acknowledgement for past harms, land back, additional resources for harmed communities, greater access to education or investment capital or health care or housing.
Reparations are not intended to make something right–in most instances, that is no longer possible–and they’re not a payoff; they are an effort to recognize a past wrong, atonement, an effort toward repair.
“Reparations is all about love,” Terry Marshall, Intelligent Mischief founder and executive creative director, told Forbes.com. “In the popular consciousness of reparations, people have fear about reparations; there’s always fear that someone’s going to take something that’s mine. It’s going be chaos. You can’t possibly pay back for what happened.”
Fear rarely leads to clear thinking or positive outcomes, but fear has become the default setting for social and political conversations in 2025 America.
Is there anything to fear in the way Shillingford describes what reparations for Black and Indigenous people looks like to her?
“It looks like people feeling free to reclaim things they feel have been lost: languages, culture, a sense of feeling like all bodies are beautiful,” she said. “It looks like communities thriving, being able to resource themselves. It looks like democracy, participatory governance, economic democracy. It looks like being reconnected to the land and having a renewed relationship with the Earth. It looks like feeling more connected to solar and lunar cycles, being reconnected to our lineages of all kinds, our ancestral traditions, but also feeling a sense of responsibility for the future.”
Repair
Reparations are important to the exhibition, repair, however, is essential. That’s the goal. That’s why “repair” is in the exhibition title, not “reparations.” Reparations are a means to an end; repair is the end.
Repair is a broader concept.
“It’s a culture and a way of being; reparations is a specific policy. We are interested in a form of reparations that can lead to repair,” Shillingford said. “Looking at different elements of society and seeking to repair and heal and undo fragmentation. A culture of repair. How can we imagine this country and the world existing in a culture of repair where we know how to interrupt harm–and we understand that harm exists, that’s human–but we all are well versed in mechanisms of repair of all kinds and at all levels.”
Repair.
That’s a big idea.
Marshall knows how to get there.
“To make love a political project. That’s a central piece of making a culture of repair,” he said. “The current reality we live in is people deciding for fear to be a cultural project: fear who you don’t understand, fear those who are different from you, fear what’s going to happen to you in the future. You now have people snatching people off the street wearing masks. You can say these people deserve benefits and these other people don’t. You’ve created the other. How do you make love a political project in order to then create a culture of repair to then have reparations to repair all the harms done by the current system?”
Good luck in a country where even simple empathy has come to be viewed as a weakness by the ruling political and economic elites, let alone love. Cruelty as policy. Cruelty for cruelty’s sake.
“What if we say there is no other; all are welcome as long as we figure out a sustainable way of distributing resources in society,” Marshall continues. “What does that look like? What policies do you then enact? What do you teach in school when you have that as an approach? What do you teach when you want to embrace, extend love to other nations, other countries, to your neighbors.”
Exhibition artists were invited to explore those questions, and questions of repair; what it might look like. In matters as seemingly insurmountable as repair in America for Black and Indigenous people, it can be helpful to start at the destination and work backwards. Imagine the goal and go in reverse. These conversations too often fail to leave the starting blocks, derailed by–you name it–practicality, finances, patriarchy, racism, politics, prejudice, stereotypes, history.
“There was this opportunity around world building, and in our experience, when people take time to actively imagine what they want the future to be, it becomes less scary,” Shillingford said. “Let’s not get caught up in policy conversations or conversations that are inherently filled with friction; maybe we can be in a conversation about what do we want the future to look like, and what do we want repair to be? Expand (conversations of reparations) beyond the monetary and beyond property and have it be about how do we create a society where everyone knows how to engage in repair.”
A world of repair.
A world of love.
A hopeful world imagined at Intelligent Mischief.