The Emotional Museum: Anger

How do you feel when you step into a museum? It’s rarely a simple answer. 

Through ‘The Emotional Museum’, a team of University of Glasgow researchers untangle the complex and often overlooked feelings evoked by collections and the spaces that hold them. 

Moving beyond the labels and the glass cases, we ask: what do these objects really do to us? 

From joy to exhaustion and from anger to ambivalence, join us as we explore the full spectrum of feelings that museums provoke. 

What do our emotional responses to collections reveal about power, identity and belonging? And how might reckoning with these emotions help us build more honest and accountable museums? 

In this episode, John, Taylar and Zaki tackle anger and rage.

Transcript

TAYLAR

Anger and passion are very… they're siblings. And I think that also fuels to keep going and to make small strides and start to get to where you need to be.

ZANDRA

The Emotional Museum is a series of conversations exploring what we feel when we enter museum spaces.

Through intimate conversations, we unpack the emotions that surface among objects, stories, and silence - how memory, identity and power shape our experiences of museums, and how museums shape us in return.

In this episode, John, Taylar and Zaki tackle anger and rage.

JOHN
Hi everybody, welcome back to the Emotional Museum. This week, the emotion that we will be tackling is feelings of anger and or rage. This week it's me, John, along with…

ZAKI

Zaki.

TAYLAR

And Taylar.

JOHN

Okay, so to kick off the conversation here, as we have done for other weeks previously, we'd just like to touch on some dictionary definitions for these terms, these emotional responses, things that we've kind of come across in our research for this session and how they maybe relate to some personal experiences that we've all had. Anyone want to kick off?

TAYLAR

I mean, I had a look, I think it was the Collins dictionary. Well, a load of, everyone has their own slightly different ones, but I think the wording changes the meaning as well. but Collins says it defines anger as a strong emotion that you feel when you think that someone or something has behaved in an unfair, cruel or unacceptable way. And then it defines rage as uncontrollable anger, which often leads to violence, which is interesting when you compare the two.

It brings a physical emotion. And I think when it comes to museums, I'm not sure for everybody else, but for me, it was always very much, well, just tear it all down. Right, let's just tear the whole thing down, get rid of all of it. and I think it's an interesting thing to consider.

JOHN

Yeah, those definitions came across for me as well, just from the Oxford Languages dictionaries, I had anger as kind of like a feeling of either annoyance, displeasure or hostility as being the main three aspects of it. and then rage, like you say, Taylar, just kind of being a version of that to a very strong extent that you kind of struggle to keep within yourself.

So, I think it's interesting to talk about both because I don't know whether it's sort of just like a British thing or whatever, but expressing rage in public is kind of something that, at least to me, I'm sort of like, I would, you try really hard not to do that, right? Like it's, especially when you're in a public space with other people, other people are there, where it's kind of like not something that's suitable necessarily for where we are, but obviously that's not really how rage operates.

And I kind of like that triple definition of anger, of annoyance, displeasure and hostility, because all three of those things are very different and they manifest in very different ways as well. You can kind of be annoyed and displeased something or you can feel really strongly negatively about it.

ZAKI

Just, so from, like, a psychoanalytic or psychotherapy kind of background, just working on myself with anger, I've done a lot of reading on this and so I just wanted to say that not from the dictionary but a book called Anger, Rage and Relationship: An Empathic Approach to Anger Management by Sue Parker Hall, 2009, she makes a real, I've never forgotten this, she makes a really good separation between anger being like a legit emotional register for a human being.

That's really important, and literally the quote was, ‘if a heartbeat is a vital sign of physical health, anger is the vital sign of emotional health’. But then she also goes on to talk about rage, says, you know, anger, almost like what Taylar started with it, is a moral compass. It kind of, you know, it helps your sense of justice or injustice from quite a young age, but she also talks about rage being something in infancy in human beings as quite necessary.

The rage when you're very small – so, infancy is like anywhere from zero to 1 year old – to rage about something is when your needs aren’t met and where there's some sense of, and it's not something you do consciously or something that you think is going to be productive to get what you need, but it's a state of where something is uncertain or you can't really process what's happening. So, that evolves in infancy, but then it can become really dysfunctional later on in life as well. And I really like that definition.

So, just to finish that quote, she says, ‘anger protects the self in all relationships. It is rage that is damaging’. And then she makes the distinctions and it's a really interesting book, but she talks about kind of anger being really important in relation to fairness and justice, whereas rage can be a protective thing, but it's not… it can be become destructive so quickly.

JOHN

Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point to bring up. I think it's very important as well. Certainly, the last week with myself, Salma and Amina, when we were talking about joy and playfulness, a key point that we kind of wanted to hammer home was the idea that there is a space for all of these emotional reactions and they can all be beneficial.

And that extends to things like anger and rage. Because like you say, that's how things are changed, is through expressions of anger and expressions of displeasure and things like that. It's a very important tool for kind of making things change in the way that you want them to without necessarily going so far into harmful rages, as your quote said.

[…]

Should we talk about some experiences that we've had in our own research or our own kind of experiences with museums, whether through this project or through our own kind of like private visits and stuff like that, like in our own time? Things that have sparked anger, any form of anger that we've touched on?

TAYLAR

I was going to say, I mean, it's a lot. It's hard. I feel like within my work, always having to deal with like colonialism and for me it's narratives that are the most frustrating. So, when I come in… when I go into certain like museum spaces or I look at the descriptions of things, it's the narrative that… I think that kind of brings that type of anger. I think for me, when I look into, I look into enslaved people and enslaved women and sometimes in the trying to be objective, when we're looking at archival documents or you're looking at artifacts, it perpetuates the violence of how they view enslaved people at the time, reading the archives is what verbatim, rather than kind of going against the grain.

And I think so when, for me, anger, when I come into those spaces is I guess seeing that or reading the displays that I say, well, this is, for example, an image of a like, quote, barbaric woman, as it says in X, Y, and Z. And I think that is where I kind of experienced that anger. But it's interesting because the more I look into this work and it's expected within certain areas, it becomes less anger and more of a like… it kind of bubbles, it half bubbles into rage or half just settles down into annoyance because you're like, oh, do you know what? I know, I expect it.

So, I think it is interesting. I think one of the questions that you can talk about later into anger leading into different emotions. But for my work, yeah, I think it's narratives that have always fuelled anger for me, especially since my work tries to tackle that.

JOHN

For me, a lot of it kind of, it's sort of similar to you, Taylar, in the sense where it's like subjects that I have researched quite a lot previously, and sort of like certain truths are being kind of left out or explained in a way that kind of exonerates them in a sense. That causes a lot of anger for me, because you can, like you say, you can sort of see the underlying narrative of maybe who's constructing the museum, who's paying for the museum, who's funding these exhibits, and how these things are talked about. And whether it's just kind of a lot of the time throughout this experience, I've been kind of documenting content warnings as part of our kind of experience as people going around, because it's never really been something that I've looked at much before.

I kind of just, I expect to see them and I see them and I kind of move on. But before this project I'd never really kind of sat down and looked at them and the way that they're written and gone, well, who is this really talking to? Who is this actually trying to warn? And it's a very, usually it's a very specific audience. And automatically it's a very vague, a lot of the time, and sometimes they're done well, a lot of the time it's a very kind of generic, vague, blanket statement about something being difficult to read and something along the lines of we ask our visitors to sit with their discomfort or to acknowledge the difficulty of things like that.

And it's like, you understand what people are trying to do, but at the same time, it's, you can do that through the exhibit. And a lot of places don't do that, and they don't go far enough into it, explaining situations that they'll talk about interactions, like colonial interactions, for example, and they'll just very briefly talk about like trade with indigenous peoples, right? And it just seems like a complete kind of give and give relationship. And obviously a lot of us know that that's not true.

There's one that stuck out to me in a museum I saw that was to do with native Polynesians in the Pacific, and it was about how a lot of their kind of artifacts ended up in this museum. And it was to do with kind of like the language was all very kind of syrupy, right? It was like, oh, there was these great kind of like formal ties with, you know, native chiefs – or whatever the words is they wanted to use – and they very willingly showed them the technology and gave them all these artifacts… and it's like, realistically, that's not true at all. And there's a certain part of that that's being kind of simplified, shall we say, for a younger audience.

And that's, you know, that's obviously something that happens. And of course it does, and as it should, because museums aren't just for one person, they're for everybody, but there's a certain part of me that sees something like that, and I'm kind of just like, there's so much more to this that you're not even touching on at all, and you have all these objects, and you know why you have them. There should be more of like an inkling to kind of put that front and centre and that makes me quite angry when I see things like that.

ZAKI

Thinking about the range of emotions, and each museum is different, each place where the country you're in, I think two things I felt most anger rise in me with museums, is usually about who works there and less about the labelling. The labelling is important and reflects who works there, but I think the things that have made me angry going to museums in Britain since like early childhood until my mid-40s is usually about who is not working there - more to the point. Who is not working behind there? And therefore – the kind of, absolutely the language, the labelling, the way things are put out and curated – that definitely caused me anger because it's a sense of the injustice sometimes. Whether it's collections of… my parents used to take us to mining museums in Wales, so, we're like, very nerdy museum visitors! And I love those mining museums. But I was like, you know, this is the life of most of the poor working-class people in the UK.

Like bits where, like who's working in the museum and doing that history or who's showing those things? So that used to frustrate me and make me angry as a child. But then sometimes, you know, there's material in the museum that showed about the resilience and livelihoods, the levity of the people working in the mines; then you'd see all their music, their artistry, that kind of eased the anger a bit. But it’s so often about who was working there or not working there, whether it reflected where the material was taken from or received by or held by – I’m using syrupy language myself – but the other one that got me angry was about private museums, especially private museums when they hold your ancestral belongings and ancestral remains. I'd never really clocked private museums ever.

I think like a lot of people, you don't know, it could be living next to one you don't realise. So that definitely, those kind of private museums, which kind of often you just stumble across them unless you're an expert, or you are on projects, like a formal project. I think that anger often comes there. Again, it's about access and who's running it, and I think that almost like a stately home, in a way, sometimes that kind of anger where you can go, wow, this looks amazing, and then you suddenly realise that, hold on, this is built entirely from… exploitation.

But especially the doors are closed to the public, usually, but by appointment, you will be – I’ll wave the wand and bam, you're allowed in. This is, yeah… so, there's two things: who works in it or who's excluded from it, and then if it's not a public museum, that will often make me angry straight away before I even know what's in it, because it tells me something about what that institution is, its purpose, like what its purpose is. I will just add, so sorry, I will just add one more thing. I was thinking about with anger, was there's like a lot of popular movements around the world that are coming about social justice.

There's that phrase, I can't remember who, I don't think there's one quote, it just gets bandied about, which is, if you're not angry, you're not paying attention. And that is often where it's… that anger is part of paying attention.

JOHN

I do want to say as well, I agree with you on the access thing. It's something that's just kind of come back to me that also really annoys me is - we touched on it before, but it's this idea of hoarding, of like kind of hoarding objects. And it's more when I see a museum and a lot of the time you'll see them kind of brag about how big their storerooms are, how many things they have, right? It's this, we've got this… insert insanely large number here of, say for example, something like Benin Bronzes in the British Museum, right?

There's just, we've got hundreds upon thousands of these things. It's like, cool, where are they then? They're in like a nondescript storage room somewhere, but it's this idea that so much of what you see, there's only, what you see in a museum is only really about 10 or 20% of what they actually have a lot of the time. And that's what really annoys me is when I think about how many things they have in back rooms that they couldn't explain to you how they got them. There's one that really stuck with me.

I went to the National Museum in Edinburgh and I was upstairs and I saw like across the room like a stone statue that I knew was Huastec, which is like a very specific Meso-American indigenous group from like the Veracruz area in like the 10th century. And because I've studied them, I kind of was able to pick out the facial features, and I was like, why is this here? It was just kind of standing on its own. There was a very brief description, there was no context, like in the surrounding wall.

It was just kind of positioned next to other stone artifacts from like various different cultures, various different times – and it was cool to see one, but I was like, I want to know why this is here. And I tried to find out for a long time, like checking through records and stuff. No, nothing. No information. So, a lot of time this stuff kind of just appears, and the whole like hidden aspect of that really, really annoys me.

TAYLAR

Yeah, I think with the context as well is, from what you just picked up in terms of just with other, just with other statues and how I think it goes, I guess it goes back to my point, about narratives to help what is the description of the narrative shown within that or it's not in there at all. And I think that's what kind of angers me about, I guess, displays in museums more generally. I think I cannot remember what article I read it from, but it was ages ago, but speaking about freezing that artifacts in time behind the glass case where it is not where it's supposed to be, where it is not used in a certain way.

So, for example, I know the ISM in Liverpool have spoken about this in terms of the… drums and the things that they have in this world which is placed within other like quote African objects or African musical instruments and it doesn't take into account, okay, the actual, its use or where is it, what part of Africa was it put in? And it kind of just compounds all of these important cultures and narratives in just a one throwaway thing, again, leaning to - this is, well, it's just what we have.

And I think speaking to, I guess, having so much in storage, when you think about on the other hand, if they have it all out and they put, when they have them all out and have them in all these just random boxes or just to say that we have them, that's another issue. I think in terms of, that's what brings me anger. I think when it comes to displays of museums, and in my head they can't win, but like it's like I'm going to get frustrated either way.

ZAKI

I was thinking when you were saying that, I was thinking of Zimbabwean anthropologist, Lennon Mhishi, based at Oxford, he talks about incarceration at museums, and I think, I can't remember the phrase – I think incarceriality? - but this thing of like items in a museum, particularly if they're, you know, looted from the rest of the world into Britain, this idea that it's a prison of sorts, that things are held and that thing of feeling incarcerated in a museum in relation to that dynamic.

And it definitely reminds me of like, I think times where I've not felt angry here with the museum is when I can see there's efforts to take the items wherever they are out of the museum and into community, or to tour them around for people that kind of feels different, but something about the collecting, the capturing, definitely, what both you said really resonates with me.

TAYLAR

Because I think we lean into this idea of what like… best practice, and when it comes to, I guess, museums and collections, it's more of, okay, how best can we preserve this? How best can we preserve these certain areas? But like you said, even bringing it out and letting it engage - some, in my personal opinion, I think some artifacts, it's worse, keeping them in that frozen box in time and not using them to how, I guess, their cultures and their ancestors supposed to use.

Sometimes they can let them do what they want with it. In term, even when we're talking about like the returning Benin Bronzes, they say, well, it's not as easy as it is. Some people don't have the access to preserve X, Y, and Z. Sometimes you have to give the cultures in these areas the freedom to do what they want with their own things.

JOHN

We've spoken a lot so far about kind of like our own experiences with feeling anger and rage in a museum as viewers and as people who enter these spaces from the outside, obviously with a very kind of set perspective based on our own experience and our own research.

I think it would be prudent maybe to touch on how we feel, how aware we think the museums themselves are of these emotional responses, specifically when it comes to things like anger and rage and frustration that are so, I feel like so quite frequently expressed through various mediums. And sort of what, are they available, are they aware of these reactions? Should they be more aware? Should they be aware in general? And like what provisions they make for these sort of expressions or should they make for these expressions?

ZAKI

I went to... this is not part of our research group, but the Wellcome Collection in Euston, London, had an exhibition called Hard Graft, and that was about unseen or unrecognised labour throughout human history. And it was obviously, it was a small, small space curated within an inch of its life, and, you know, but it started with the colonial plantation in the Caribbean and the Americas.

I'm talking about kind of Anglo and Western European colonialism and they knew this was like a lot of trauma on display. But what they did, you didn't actually kind of be guided around the space, but they made a space that was like a sensory room towards the end of the route so that people who had gone through it had some, and it was literally just like, I'm going to describe it poorly, but there's almost, imagine a big kind of mushroom in the middle of a room where you can touch it with, put your hand on it and it will respond in colours. And then around the room there was some artwork of lots of hands like holding each other, but in a, it looks positive, not oppressive, and I've never really seen that in a museum before.

Like a sensory room or I have seen it for wee ones, like a sensory room, like the National Museum of Scotland has a great sensory room for little ones. But for any human being going to that space, there was a sensory space, I guess, to ground and to remember you're in the now, to kind of engage other senses. I've never seen that before in a museum or gallery. That was quite unique.

TAYLAR

Sorry, I was going to say, I think ISM have had like a little bit of a decompression section towards the end. It may be different. I've been there for a bit, but, they, the current layout, obviously it's under construction, but the current layout that they had kind of led to this room where it was a lot brighter space. For people that haven't been to like ISM before, it's a quite dark, enclosed space. It's a brighter space and it allows people to draw or to talk, and it also does a lot of artwork and things like that.

So, I think it's interesting. When it comes to certain museums who are aware, and there are good examples of those, okay, well, they are aware that these spaces can cause X, Y, and Z, meaning that they have a space to facilitate when people feel those emotions. I think, I feel like, especially, I say post 2020, because you know, everyone had their whole revamp based off of everything that happened with Black Lives Matter and all these different things and reckoning with their path, there is an awareness of the sensitivities of spaces. Whether they decide to act on it is something different.

And I think with, especially since we're coming off the back of 2020 and not many people, their eyes aren't on museums and institutions as much as it was before. Yeah, it just depends, and I think with these institutions, you have to, there's understanding that they, it's to an extent a business, right?

They have primary, primary audiences that attend, goals that they need to meet in order to keep things running and for to get money for their funds, X, Y, and Z. And there is, I guess, a cost-benefit analysis for certain institutions, especially with different audiences in different places. I think it's hard when we're talking about, I guess, how anger is displayed with these spaces. It depends on if these audiences have then spoken to the institution themselves, especially when you go back to the fact that, staff and the people that work there, some people aren't aware of these, or they feel this rage or frustration with certain spaces.

To some point, it's down to, or some are more reliant on, I guess, the audiences that come in and say, actually, that didn't make me feel that great, or actually, I think we need X, Y, and Z. And I think it's just dependent on people who go there, or if people whose anger is displayed, for my case, in some cases, where I just won't engage, and you just disappear and don't turn up to what extent they kind of, make provisions to deal with that anger if no one is actually going forth with that.

It's hard because they don't, I don't want to take away, I won't say blame, but to say that this isn't this, like the museum, it's entirely their fault or to put blame on certain things, but it's a weird thing to kind of deal with and it's dependent, I think, on the area and geographical locations and so many different things.

ZAKI

I only thinking of that working collection one, I was like, wow, this is really an attempt to soothe the anger that will come out. I was like, I don't really want to do this. I want a rage room. I want to go smash some stuff up. That's how I was feeling. But the soothing thing, I was in a group, so I went with it. And that's why I was like, oh, this is quite, this is really thoughtful, it was there. But actually, if they'd been in a rage room at the end of it, smash some cheap plates without hurting anybody.

Or, you know, what would it be like if you could express anger and rage within the museum space, without being criminalised or without being hospitalised? Or being put on the, this person is banned from the venue list, like what would it be like to express that anger and rage?

Particularly for certain, particularly for black and Asian peoples in Britain, but for anybody, the risk of expressing anger and rage related to criminal proceedings, hospitalisation, being sectioned or just straight out banning and being seen as a bad egg without necessarily causing any damage to anybody else other than yourself. Yeah, I wonder what that'd be like.

TAYLAR

When we talk about these soothing spaces in comparison to like a rage room type thing, would you argue that, since we spoke about with the Portrait Gallery in terms of shaping the emotions that you're supposed to have, would you argue then with certain soothing spaces it does the same rather than allowing you to express the same, rather than allowing you to feel what you want to feel in any way? It's more of a, we understand this is your rage, but this is how we want you to deal with your rage and you can't deal with it in any other sense.

ZAKI

It's an extension of curation. That's essentially what it is. And I know I do it when I'm working with young people in dire poverty or who are incarcerated themselves, or who if we did a museum visit, I know I am compromised as a youth worker because I'll try and soothe or bring creative stuff.

When, actually, maybe I should just back off and let them rage and do their thing in response to what they see. Because it's often not the exhibits, it's the building itself, it's the reverence they're meant to show. And they're like, I'm not going to be reverent to this. And they kick off. And often the youth worker I work caught in be like, oh, we're meant to be civilised. Why am I doing that? I'm curating their experience.

Like that, I think it is part of the curation. It's definitely part of the curation. And we don't often talk about that, about how you, the audience, is part of the curation of the space. What's civil and civilised to do, and is anger and rage barbarous?

JOHN

I think it's really important to have kind of like options for how you want to express how you're feeling at the end. And this conversation you guys have both just had, the ISM definitely still has that at the end where it's sort of like, you know, as I said previously, it very quickly goes from these kind of cramped dark space into a very kind of bright, open, sort of celebratory space, which I think is necessary in a museum like that. I think there is absolutely a need for that to exist. But like you both say, that is again kind of cultivating your own emotional response.

It's like you've spent 60% of this feeling kind of horrible and a little bit sick. Now you have to feel joyous. And I think you sort of see a similar thing with museums that again implemented to bring it back in, things like content warnings. And sort of a lot of museums I've gone to will have like a kind of generic video screen that will explain to you where a lot of the collections come from, how they've come to be in this country, what the museum is doing to try and like work on that. And it's like a vague umbrella stance on every single thing they have. And while there is a benefit to that, not all objects are the same.

There's a lot of different kind of working parts that come into play with different collections from different parts of the world. And it just sort of seems like a very blanket attempt to cover every single aspect of how somebody might be feeling. And it automatically goes to a certain perspective, which is usually in a lot of places it comes as like a middle-class white perspective on what's going on, right?

Which is part of the reason why before this project, a lot of what we've talked about, I'd never really experienced before. Because of how that's sort of designed. And only really through doing this project, in several instances, have I been like, yeah, actually, who is this talking to?

It's not talking to a lot of people. There was one specific example we had where they had a content warning. And it was the same kind of lines. It was like, we ask you to sit with your discomfort as you go through this. And only in our debrief afterwards, somebody brought it up, I can’t remember who it was, it may have even been Zandra, in fact, it was kind of like, you would never say that to certain people and certain people's perspectives.

Because who are you to tell people to sit with their discomfort based on how they feel? And now I was kind of like, whoa, yeah, that's a really important point. But up until that point, it'd just been never something that I'd thought about before.

ZAKI

I remember that, one of the things you're talking about, John, was the Walker Gallery in Liverpool and it was the, because I listened to a recording I did for myself, just like an audio I did on the day we went in there. I remember Zandra being really clear about it was the shackles to enslave people and keep them, if they're literally on the display in the Walker Gallery, and a piece of A4 paper on the door, giving the discomfort thing.

I remember her really clearly saying, like, you're not going to ask people to hold their discomforts in shackles. You're going to rage, and she was spot on.

JOHN

I think a lot of what we've touched on there is that there's certainly there's a lot of kind of moving parts with museums, as we all kind of know. It's not really like one person's responsibility or job to kind of make everything line up exactly how you want it. There's lots of people to please, there's lots of people to satisfy, there's a wide kind of... base of people that go there.

And I think what we've sort of touched on throughout is how anger and rage can very quickly feed into what's more kind of like frustration and annoyance that you were talking about earlier, Taylar, where it's not kind of like a large, like expressive feeling of anger. It's more sort of like you see something so often repeated that it just becomes frustrating. And obviously frustration, as we've touched on in previous weeks, kind of leads into feelings of like exhaustion.

So, I think with something as, with such a strong emotion such as anger, how do we feel like those feelings in that space, how do we feel like anger can then change into other emotional responses?

TAYLAR

I think, well, the only thing I can say was going back to that same point, really, when it turns into anger and fatigue. You can only be angry for a certain amount of time. There is fatigue and I guess sadness that comes with it, because I feel like with some of these spaces, or I guess with, if you have so many community activists and so many people that have worked for decades in trying to diversify all these institutions and like having knowing people within them, I ask them all the time, like, don't you just get so over it?

Aren't you just tired that all the efforts and stuff that you do for decades and decades, while you have made big strides, it doesn't always meet the goal that you always, that you intended to because of all these setbacks and all these different institutional things that you've got to deal with. And I think for me, I think that's where the sadness comes into it as well, because I feel like the dream museum or the dream way of talking about narratives in histories isn't feasible for most those people up.

It's not feasible in the way that we would like it to because there are so many different business things and so many different ways and hoops you have to jump through. So, I think for me, I think that's where it will just lead into fatigue and sadness. That sounds very pessimistic though.

ZAKI

I was really looking forward to this conversation because to really talk about anger and rage and at the same time I'm thinking of Bell Hooks: Will to Change, and thinking like how we can mask so many other emotions in the museum as well in that setting. And so I was thinking about that thing I said at the beginning about the movement.

If you're not angry, you're not paying attention. I was thinking the flip of it is if you're not paying attention, you're not just angry. There's other stuff going on. So, I love that question you posed, John. For that very reason, what else is in there? Sadness, fatigue, confusion, ambivalence.

It's all in the mix. But as long as I think for me, it's like bringing it back to that moral compass part of anger, the part of something, the injustice part. That is the bit I'm most interested in is justice work. And I think that's where if museums were to think about those feelings is about does the emotions people will feel - complete range - but what do you do about justice?

And that would be interesting to see what visitors, museums and workers in museums feel about justice in their particular space and their role, and whether justice means your museum won't exist anymore, your roles won't exist anymore, or will they transform and be in a different form?

JOHN

Yeah, I think that's a really important point to bring up at the end there as well about sort of the people that work within the sector as well. Because of course, as you touched on, Taylar, there's got to be a certain level of underlying frustration for people who are working behind the scenes trying to make change in museums. But I feel that also even goes down to somebody who just works in a museum in person, somebody who's a supervisor, like a gallery supervisor, or somebody who has to, like a tour guide, something like that, right?

There's certainly a lot of kind of anger and rage that can come about just based on maybe how you see people interacting in a space or working in a space that you know should be changing but isn't. I think it's always important in these kind of conversations to bring back to the people who actually work within these fields and how frustrating that must be for them to, because it's not only a lot of them feel how we feel, but it's also having to work in that space day in, day out, all the time. Maybe even dealing with, on occasion, like disruptive people who were there, people who don't kind of, aren't like respecting what's in the exhibits and stuff like that. I think it's important to touch on that too.

TAYLAR

I was just going to add as well, I think guilt is also an important emotion that I guess leads into everything that you've just spoken about.

JOHN

Guilt's very important. It definitely interrelates with anger. I've felt that a lot in our research and what's been going on as well.

ZAKI

I suspect if you, there's no typical museum in the world, but the museums we have visited on this research journey as the Emotional Museum Project, imagine if you did a tester, like a survey of some kind with all the workers, it'd be so down to their department, how they felt. Yeah, I think it'd probably be a range, but I think if museum workers are not feeling anger on any level, there's something wrong.

JOHN

Finally, I think it's best to kind of finish off and just touch on this last point a little bit. So it's kind of sort of, Taylar, I don't know if you want to bring this in.

TAYLAR

It kind of, I feel like we kind of touched on it though in terms of the result of anger and kind of feelings of anger when in these spaces often cloud our perspectives or our understandings of a museum on a deeper level. And I kind of, I post that because in my experience, it often does.

When I come into these situations, sometimes music, like there is this stereotype of what a museum is and what a museum looks like and this definition of it. And sometimes you go into maybe unconventional museums exactly that you've spoken to, and it may not be like that. But when I come into specific museums, and that's how all of this started, actually, to be honest, I was like to Zandra.

I was like, I don't like museums. I don't want to be here. I don't care. Like, there's nothing that you can tell me. Give everything back. I don't care what it is. Give it all back and there's no, and she was like, okay, let's unpack this and figure out where is all of this coming from?

Let's look at the uses of museums or X, Y, and Z. So, I think that's the question that I kind of posed because my anger clouded any reason to have any museum in any form.

JOHN

Yeah, I mean, speaking for myself, that's definitely something that I've kind of felt before. It's just sort of like, well, why do we have all these things? Why don't we just kind of blanket give everything back? And obviously through kind of education and working quite closely with people who are working behind repatriation efforts at the University of Aberdeen, for example, and things like that. I've learned that it's obviously a lot more complex than that. But yeah, no, definitely I've felt the same versus sort of like, what's the point? Just give it all away again.

ZAKI

Thank you so much, Taylar, for sharing that insight to where it started from. That's really powerful, really powerful. I think thinking of that, and especially as we're towards the latter part of the project, really vital coming back to that, I think, of like where that started from and that dialogue between you both. So, one last thing I want to add is just us thinking about a lot of rap lyrics.

Like a lot of my thinking comes through the knowledge in hip hop and rap, and particularly from African-American, kind of pan-Africanism and hip-hop, and I was thinking of a song by Onyx, and I like seen as like, they're really angry guys in hip-hop, and an album in 1995 called All We Got Is Us, and a song called 2 Wrongs, and it's rageful.

It's full of rage. It's literally two wrongs don’t make it right, but it damn sure makes us equal. And it's full of rage, but the lyrics in each verse push the, they're kind of taking your journey of going, don't just be rageful, point it in the right direction, make it constructive. And I'm not going to do any more quotes, just go listen to the song, but the two wrongs, it's hard to listen to that song, but I thought, I don't know if they're in a museum where they wrote it, but it could apply to some of those feelings of frustration and fatigue and all these things we're talking about.

It didn't really relate to that, but that kind of came to me in our conversations because sometimes it's easier to rage in the more infant way than to find, again, that book I talk about, Sue Parker Hall, adult rage. Put it in the right direction for some kind of social justice work.

ZANDRA

Thanks for listening to The Emotional Museum podcast. This episode was brought to you by The Emotional Museum, with The Hunterian at University of Glasgow.