Emotional Heritage
2025 on, Focussing on project with "a space" at God's House Tower, Southampton
Emotional Heritage is a phrase I use to describe:
• Histories and inheritance of feelings within specific communities and / or sites
• Everyday games, activities, habits used to tend to and create specific atmospheres
• Creative intimacies & improvised togetherness passed on within a group or community
Being part of multiple marginalised communities myself, I’ve found many of the museums & archives who commission me, tend to have few, if any, objects / records representing the lives & experiences of these groups. As I worked on projects focussing on building access for contemporary marginalised communities to access & influence collections I realised: one of the challenges is, these communities have different approaches to archiving, nurturing and sharing heritage- due to mainstream methods for collecting & representing histories not being fit for purpose for these groups. Many of the approaches used by these communities are described by institutions as “intangible heritage"/ social practice / community art.
I started to feel that much of what these communities value in terms of preserving culture for future generations is about emotional sustenance & community building in the face of discrimination. For example- LGBTQIA+ people have history of organising ourselves in “found" families. Drawing together & maintaining these relationships in the face of persecution/ marginalisation takes specific emotional tools / rituals / games / habits. These are often also supported by collaborative creativity for example, in LGBTQIA+ communities drag is often made in drag families / houses. Emotional Heritage is the phrase I use to describe these ways of approaching collecting and sharing histories.
Through this project I am developing a framework and toolkit for researching, nurturing and sharing Emotional Heritage, focussing on unconventional materials to describe and experience multisensory and interpersonal aspects of making, being and preserving heritage, particularly in marginalised groups.
