Article begins
Credit:
Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia. Photo: James Austin
Meduulla Ceremonial Bow Stand, Democratic Republic of Congo.
Radical Intent
The Sainsbury Centre, located on the campus of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, United Kingdom, was founded in 1978 to challenge the museum orthodoxies of how and by whom art was experienced. The building, designed by Norman Foster, created an open-plan space for visitors to choose their own pathways through the collections on display. The founders wanted to break the perceptions and structures of cultural hierarchy between cultural objects within the space. At the Centre, art and material culture from across time and space are displayed in dialogue with each other across the very large open-plan Living Area. The aim of this gallery is to allow visitors to find the particular object(s) that speaks to them. A mid-twentieth-century Giacometti standing woman sculpture faces a Jomon flame ceramic vessel from 2000 BCE, while a Maya eccentric flint looks out upon a painting by Leonora Carrington. Thousands of humanity’s most recognizable cultural creations—from contemporary to ancient—are positioned within an interactive cultural landscape for visitors to wander through, under, and around.
Building upon this radical intent of the 1970s, in 2023 we became a museum that formally understands our collection as animate. We understand that artists, makers, and creators are materializing an essence of cultural energy, creating a lifeforce within each and every work in the collection. This changed our reality, in that the first function of the museum is not to preserve, protect, and communicate the collection, but rather to give these living entities their best lives. This changed the foundation from which everything in the museum is built.
This fundamental shift to the museum’s governance and mission has inevitably had widespread ramifications across the museum structure and organization. In practical terms, visitors to the Sainsbury Centre are now informed at our welcoming reception that we understand the collection as being alive, and that they are here to meet and build relationships with these non-human beings in different ways than they might in other museums and galleries. We have worked collaboratively with friends, colleagues, and specialists from across the world to create quite unique experiences for visitors and for the works themselves.
In this, we have found sound to be an extremely useful tool to activate these relationships within the space. Sound is particularly effective in encouraging people to spend a longer period of time with a particular object or artwork than they would otherwise. Furthermore, the use of talking, music, or ambient sound—or a combination therein—helps people open up their thought processes and emotions in quote powerful ways.
The photograph is a close-up of the sculpture of the head of a sleeping baby lying on its side, with eyes closed and at rest. There is no body. The object appears to be metallic, with a greenish patina. Some parts, such as the tip of the nose appear polished. The background is light grey.
Credit:
Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia. Photo: James Austin
Baby Asleep by Jacob Epstein, earliest known of Epstein’s sculptures.
Giving Voice: Sharing Stories
One of the easiest ways to help people animate what they might otherwise perceive as inanimate is by giving voice to them. Therefore, we have created Sharing Stories, in which a visitor can choose “which voice” of the artwork they wish to hear from. They can choose between a selection of three different voices: an artist/maker/creator, an expert/knowledge keeper/specialist, or a lived experience based on an aspect of the lifeforce of the work of art.
The concept is to not only give the visitor a sense of the multi-vocality and complexity of these non-human beings, but also to enable them to find their own starting point in the conversation. Visitors often assume the museum is an authority there to tell them “the right way” to meet and understand the collection. While museums as are indeed—historically and by definition—quite deterministic about what the “right” knowledge or perspective is, by giving the visitors a choice of which voice(s) to hear, we demonstrate that there isn’t a “right” or a “wrong” voice. Any individual can create their own internal dialogue with a work in the collection—based upon their own life and experience—and anyone has the right to take that dialogue in whichever direction they wish. The key is to empower visitors with the framework, range, and alternatives to help people find their own connections.
Given the global scope of the collection, Sharing Stories required reaching out to a very diverse range of people across the world to share their perspectives and voices. Some examples include Alejandra Arias-Stella, a llama specialist in Peru talking about an Inca-era silver llama, to Stephanie Yeboah, a body image activist talking about representation of the body in Picasso’s Female Nude with Arms Raised, or Sara Sallam, an Egyptian artist talking about the influence of middle kingdom tomb reliefs on Modigliani’s perspective in his Head of a Woman painting, to Tui Hobson discussing the traditional role of carving represented in the extremely rare Fisherman’s God from Rarotonga. The range of voices presented is an indicative example of the huge range of perspectives and personalities any artwork can have. This therefore gives the visitor the ability to choose the right conversation for yourself.
For example, in the case of Yinka Shonibare’s Hybrid Baule/Yare mask, you can hear from the artist, an art historian, and a spoken word poet. First, you can hear from Yinka himself talking about how, given Picasso’s use of west African masks in his work, he is “reappropriating the appropriation.” Here, the artist explains how he created a mask that looks out across the gallery upon Picasso paintings, informing them in new ways. Next, you can choose to hear from Awol Erizku, who provides an art historical view on Yinka’s work within the practice of museums to decolonize themselves. Finally, you can hear from Piers Harrison-Read, a local hospital nurse and spoken word poet who has created a poem looking out through the eyes of the mask, reflecting on what it feels like to be objectified and appropriated within the museum space.
Words are, in many ways, the most culturally formulaic framework of knowledge, structuring the particular origins and assumptions for thought contingent on the listeners’ personal biography. Therefore, how can sound, noise and composition better activate people’s personal journeys depending on their own particular starting points? In this project, we are not only trying to impart thought and knowledge per se, but to enable active, emotive connections between human and non-human beings.
The photograph depicts an object resembling a human figure playing an accordion. The lines of the figure are sharp and angular, and the object appears to be made of some dark material. The shoulder is raised as if exerting force whilst manipulating the instrument. A single line runs down the back of the sculpture from its raised shoulder, indicating its musculature. Staggered legs, which stop at the thighs, also suggest animation. The base of the object is wide and flat while the background is plain light grey.
Credit:
Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia. Photo: James Austin
Zadkine’s The Accordion Player, inspired by Picasso and Braque and Cubist in approach.
Collections Soundtracks: SoundEscapes
Think of your favorite film and then imagine watching it without the soundtrack. That is what a museum can be like. The soundtrack is what provides the emotional tone to the visual images within any film, and the same could be true within the museum. However, how can you effectively create the right soundtrack for each individual work in the collection?
In 2024, the Sainsbury Centre collaborated with Sound and Music—a primary charity for composers in the United Kingdom—to put out an open call to anyone who wished to compose a new soundtrack that could help people connect with the non-human beings within the museum. Applicants had to find a particular work in the collection they wanted to work with, and then we would facilitate their ability to spend time with that work however they saw fit. The composer would then produce sixty seconds of sound that could activate the lifeforce of the artwork and help visitors build a relationship with it.
The response was overwhelming. We had more than eighty composers and musicians from around the world wanting to create new soundscapes for the collection. The selection of the first ten composers was driven by the need to reflect the diversity of the collection. This was done through the range of artworks selected as inspiration, the sound genres proposed, and the life experiences of the creators. As you can see from the ten soundscapes created, the relationships between artwork, sounds, and artist span from past and present, stone to oils, youth to experience, choral to electronica.
The impact of these musical experiences in the museum was immediate. SoundEscapes is available to visitors either through our Smartify app, or by just picking up a set of headphones next to the works on display. The average amount of time visitors spend looking at a museum object is much less than 10 seconds, while the time visitors spend with the objects animated by SoundEscapes has more than quadrupled. For visitors, simply listening to the soundtracks creates the time and emotional space to experience these materialisations of cultural life in their own way. Importantly, there is no need to read the label or have any previous knowledge to feel that experience. The music is the mechanism—or almost the acceptable social justification—to just be with the work for that long.
Although SoundEscapes has only been in the museum for a few months since it was launched December 9th, 2024, the interest and reactions have clearly been very strong. The main feedback is that people enjoy the soundtrack, but they have a strong opinion on whether the work has the right soundtrack. It is an instinctive reaction reflecting that ability of people to articulate their own feelings, emotions, and judgement of the animate nature of the work. In “deciding” what is the “right” soundtrack, they are—by extension—articulating their own feelings about the emotional range of the non-human being. Now that we have completed this pilot study, we are looking to expand SoundEscapes to the wider collection and will be looking for funding to achieve this in the coming years.
These different projects, each attempting to use auditory experiences to activate deeper engagement with the collection, have inspired us to expand their use in the future. Not only will we be looking for additional funding to roll out the SoundEscapes project for the entire collection on display, we are also working on how visitors might create their own soundtrack or piece of music they believe best captures the lifeforce of the object in the gallery. In addition, we are exploring how the playlist function of popular music applications such as Spotify or Apple Music can be adapted in the museum to allow people to interactively identify the right soundscape for each particular work. Funding permitting, we are hoping to soon advertise for a new Curator of Museum Soundscapes, whose role it will be to further develop and activate these alternative pathways for building more powerful relationships with the living collection in our museum.
Lillia McEnaney is the section contributing editor for the Council for Museum Anthropology.
