More Empathic Accompaniment Please!

a letter to museums and galleries

Image of Care Chains by Moi Tran (2024), Wellcome Collection

Dear Museums and Galleries!

You are putting on extremely valuable, relevant and hard-hitting exhibitions which speak to current realities (thank you!) I would also like to see more care and planning for the emotional well-being of people who come to your exhibitions.

This post is about new ideas, (or reminders of old ideas!) for structural choices after visiting these recent exhibitions in London, UK.

Over the last few months, I’ve been to see:

• Hew Locke’s ‘What have we here?’ at the British Museum. This was an installation which critically examined symbols of British power and colonial authority. Locke used artefacts from the Museum as Observations of colonial history.

• Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights at the Wellcome Foundation which aims to tell a story of undervalued work on the Plantation, in Prison, in the Home and on the Street, and its impact on the body

• Vital Signs: another world is possible at the Science Gallery, London which aims to offer original artwork in response to the interdependence of planetary and human health.

• War and the Mind at the Imperial War Museum, London (IWM) which aims to show the psychological impact of War on the mind; from what it takes to mobilise people for war, to dealing with anxiety, fear, physical limitations and endurance, to the devastating consequences and aftermaths of war.

I was accompanied

This is really important. I saw all exhibitions with someone from the Transforming Conflict course, and in the War and the Mind, we were also accompanied by another colleague from our Transforming Conflict course. I was not alone as I went to these exhibitions. I was accompanied by warm, empathic, resonant human beings.

We began each outing with a check-in:

· on the steps of the British museum on a cold and rainy day in February

· in a hectic and busy Wellcome Foundation café with loads of carers and babies

· in the cafe at the Science gallery, sitting on a shared table with workers on their lunchbreak

· in the spacious and seemingly leisurely back quarters of the café at the IWM on a sunny and warm April afternoon.

We experienced the exhibition and then had a check-out with our thoughts and feelings on the exhibition.

All exhibitions offered incredibly thought-provoking material, with eye-opening artefacts, nuanced original artwork (with Hew Locke and various artists at Hard Graft) and careful curation.

After the What have we here? exhibition, my colleague and I were asked a few post-exhibition questions in a narrow corridor exiting the exhibition (our age, had we been to the British museum before? Would we come back?) It was uncomfortable and cramped in the narrow corridor and we weren’t asked questions that would support our own processing of the material.

In our own post-exhibition checkout (on the same stairs, it was still cold) we discussed the need for a ‘Decompression room’ where people could integrate the experience of the what was witnessed, either through a verbal, (written or spoken) sharing and/or through an embodied. non-verbal experience.

At Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights, there was exactly that. There was an artwork called Care Chains (Love will continue to resonate) by Moi Tran (2024) created to honour and with the collaboration of 12 domestic workers. This artwork supported nervous system integration and connection with our thoughts, feelings and bodies, through:

· rhythmic sound of hand clapping

· music and recorded vocalisation,

· low lighting,

· benches invitingly and relationally arranged in a circle for us to sit with our co-attendees or with strangers,

· a gentle light installation of changing colours

· and optionality, you can stay as long or as little as you want. Or not at all.

The artwork acknowledges us as human beings with nervous systems that might be activated from the content of the exhibition (work on the plantation, in the home, in prison and on the street – this is challenging, ancestral, often traumatic material). I felt grateful and tender experiencing the final artwork.

(Video of Care Chains by Moi Tran (2024), Wellcome Collection)

At the Vital Signs exhibition at the Science gallery, there were ‘gallery mediators’ who were flagged up as being available to talk to, and we did engage with them with questions about the artworks, rather than about our emotional response to the exhibition. There was also an invitation to respond to a question with postit notes about what the world needs.

Then recently we went to the Imperial War Museum whose exhibitions are always very sensitively curated despite the name of the museum sounding like it advocates for more war on behalf of the Empire!

The War and the Mind exhibition explores the impact of War on the human mind; it explores what motivates people to fight in wars, and how do people feel and act during wars and come to terms with them.

Again, I was fortunate to check-in with two colleagues to put down the baggage of the week that I was coming with before the exhibition (quite a lot), then we each navigated the exhibition on our own (that’s just the way it was this time) and afterwards we went outside, sat underneath a beautiful birch tree in the unusual April sun and heat and talked about what we felt, our questions and confusions and what we would have longed for in this exhibition.

The exhibition was large, room after room of exhibits, text, audio and footage but again, there was no ‘decompression room’, a place where I could gently be in soft lighting, gentle stimulation of sound or music, without more verbal prompts.

People go to exhibitions for different reasons. The IWM audience is very diverse, and can include people with lived experience of war, or veterans who encounter some accompaniment in the sensitive portrayals of the harsh and inhumane realities of war.

IWM content is usually historical and didn’t include (in this exhibition) analysis or documentation of the human experiences of current warfare. However, the actual current reality is that I am witnessing the current genocide that is unfolding in Palestine and the war unleashed on Ukraine (and I know many people are blocking it out and switching off from it due to overwhelm and not knowing how to engage. I totally understand this experience too). So we are aware of drones and AI warfare. We are all talking about Trumps Tariff war – a different kind of war, but one in which we can also see the need to get people ‘pumped up’ in order to go along with something that is likely to impact them negatively. It’s the same psychology at play.

Opportunities for integration and accompaniment

The exhibition also missed an opportunity to support our nervous systems through this current moment. Exhibitions need to acknowledge that we have human responses to the material they are exhibiting. Here are a few strategies to consider:

· Invite people at the start to self-reflect and write down on a little notepad why they have come to the exhibition today.

· Offering a task (with the same notepad and pencil) gives people a clear focus for the exhibition.

· Invite people at the end to offer reflections on the experience, or on a question that the exhibition is grappling with. Don’t underestimate the power of a Postit note in integration spaces.

· Encourage reflection into a collective space (noticeboard, emergent artwork) on how the distant or historical issues we see before us are being played out on our phones while we are even in the exhibition. If we don’t do this linking up, confusion, hopelessness and overwhelm can set in.

· Offer nonverbal, soothing, softly-lit, creative spaces that everyone will feel good in and will especially support those with PTSD and/or neurodivergence.

· Most importantly of all, have a team of empathic responders, trained to listen nonjudgmentally, resonantly and empathically to people’s experiences, on a one to one basis. This would be an excellent way for immediate integration and accompaniment for what was witnessed.

We are not walking minds. I would never structure a workshop on conflict and grief or structure conflict processes without trauma-informed care for nervous systems and neurodivergence. I would love to see museums and galleries include this as part of their structural support for the whole human experience and potential in visiting exhibitions.

If you are a museum or gallery curator and you are interested in exploring training for staff in Empathic Accompaniment to include as support for attendees of your exhibitions, here is what you might cover in a 12 hour training.

· Introduction to Empathic accompaniment and how it differs from therapeutic accompaniment

· Listening across different social locations

· Beginning to understand unconscious bias and how to deal with what you don’t know you don’t know in relation to empathic accompaniment

· Understanding cultural humility

· Increasing resonance and authenticity in empathic listening

· More tools in Empathic accompaniment

· Practice

If you are a curator or working with audience well-being, please contact me for a conversation and more information.