Empathy Museum is a series of art installations, begun in 2015. Its purpose is to help visitors view the world through the perspectives of others, using participatory storytelling and dialogue. The project states it can help people approach global issues such as prejudice, conflict and inequality by expressing empathy to change relationships. A weekly podcast, A Mile in My Shoes, was started in 2018.
The project was founded by philosopher Roman Krznaric and is directed by artist Clare Patey.
In May 2018, Empathy Museum began a weekly podcast titled A Mile in My Shoes. The podcast shares stories of the lives of various people around the world.
Empathy Museum does not have a permanent location. Its projects are each designed as temporary installations that travel to international locations.
Empathy Museum's offices are based in London, United Kingdom.
A Thousand and One Books is a crowd-sourced collection of 1001 books. Each book in the "library" has been donated by "someone who loves that book and thinks that other people might love it too". Notable book donors include Jay Rayner, Kate Raworth, Lemn Sissay, Ian McKellen, Chris O'Dowd and Suzanne Moore. [1] The books can be taken out by the public and then passed on to other people, instead of being returned.
A Thousand and One Books has been presented at London International Festival of Theatre in 2016, [2] and at the Krasnoyarsk Book Culture Fair in 2016. [3]
Human Library is "like any other library but instead of borrowing a book you can borrow a person for conversation". The library presents a selection of "Living Books": people who tell a story about their life and discuss it with a member of the public visiting the installation.
Each Human Library is centred around a different theme including fashion, food, home and age. [4]
Human Library has been presented in London at SOAS (2015), [5] Whitechapel Gallery (2015), the London International Festival of Theatre (2016), [6] and in Perth, Western Australia, at the Perth Writers Festival (2016). [7]
A Mile in My Shoes is a travelling "shoe shop" with over 350 pairs of shoes and audio stories collected by Empathy Museum. Visitors are invited to walk a mile in someone else's shoes by temporarily exchanging their footwear for a pair in the museum's collection. While walking, visitors listen to a story about the shoe owner's life through a pair of headphones.
At each location it travels to, the museum collects stories and shoes from local people. Sometimes iterations of the project centre around certain themes. These include collections of stories from migrants in England (in collaboration with London's Migration Museum, 2018), from UK health and social care workers (commissioned by the Health Foundation, 2018), from people who came to the UK as refugees (in collaboration with Choose Love, 2019), from young people in Scotland (in collaboration with National Theatre Scotland, 2019), and stories with a connection to water (in collaboration with Arts Centre Melbourne 2020). Stories have been collected in various languages, including English, French, Italian, German, Latvian, Slovenian, Dutch, and Portuguese.
A Mile in My Shoes has been presented across England and internationally, including in Belgium (2017), [8] Australia (2017, [9] 2019 [10] ), Ireland (2017), [11] Brazil (2017), [12] Scotland (2018), [13] the USA (2018), [14] Latvia (2020), [15] Slovenia (2020), [16] Italy (2021), [17] Germany (2021), [18] and Romania (2021). [19]
From Where I'm Standing is a portrait of life in London in 2020, through photography and audio stories installed outdoors. The project celebrates 34 extraordinary people, ranging from a midwife and a supermarket worker to an undertaker and an anaesthetist. It has been displayed in London at Sceaux Gardens Estate, Peckham and Dalberg Road, Brixton. [20]
References
Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 council areas. The city was historically part of the county of Midlothian, but was administered separately from the surrounding county from 1482. It is located in Lothian on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth. Edinburgh is Scotland's second-most populous city, after Glasgow, and the seventh-most populous city in the United Kingdom.
Suzy Eddie Izzard is a British stand-up comedian, actor and activist. Her comedic style takes the form of what appears to the audience as rambling whimsical monologues and self-referential pantomime.
Sir Timothy Miles Bindon Rice is an English lyricist and author. He is best known for his collaborations with Disney on Aladdin, The Lion King, the stage adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, and the original Broadway musical Aida; with Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson of ABBA, with whom he wrote Chess; and with Andrew Lloyd Webber, with whom he wrote, among other shows, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Evita. He also wrote lyrics for the Alan Menken musical King David, and for DreamWorks Animation's The Road to El Dorado.
Alexei David Sayle is an English actor, author, stand-up comedian, television presenter and former recording artist. He was a leading figure in the British alternative comedy movement in the 1980s. He was voted the 18th greatest stand-up comic of all time on Channel 4's 100 Greatest Stand-ups in 2007. In an updated 2010 poll he came 72nd.
Kate Atkinson is an English writer of novels, plays and short stories. She is known for creating the Jackson Brodie series of detective novels, which has been adapted into the BBC One series Case Histories. She won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize in 1995 in the Novels category for Behind the Scenes at the Museum, winning again in 2013 and 2015 under its new name the Costa Book Awards.
The National Library of Scotland (NLS) is one of the country's National Collections. It is one of the largest libraries in the United Kingdom. As well as a public programme of exhibitions, events, workshops, and tours, the National Library of Scotland has reading rooms where visitors can access the collections. It is the legal deposit library of Scotland and is a member of Research Libraries UK (RLUK) and the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL).
Rona Munro is a Scottish writer. She has written plays for theatre, radio, and television. Her film work includes Ken Loach's Ladybird, Ladybird (1994), Oranges and Sunshine (2010) for Jim Loach and Aimée & Jaguar (1999), co-authored by German director Max Färberböck. Munro is the second cousin of Scottish author Angus MacVicar.
Josie Isabel Long is an English comedian. She started performing as a stand-up at the age of 14 and won the BBC New Comedy Awards at 17.
Miles Hugh Barrett Jupp is an English actor, singer, and comedian. He began his career as a stand-up comedian before playing the role of the inventor Archie in the children's television series Balamory. He also played John Duggan in The Thick of It, Nigel in the sitcom Rev, and appeared on many comedy panel shows. In September 2015, Jupp replaced Sandi Toksvig as the host of The News Quiz on BBC Radio 4.
Francis Edward Turner, is an English punk and folk singer-songwriter from Meonstoke, Hampshire. He began his career as the vocalist of post-hardcore band Million Dead, then embarked upon a primarily acoustic-based solo career following the band's split in 2005. In the studio and during live performances, Turner is accompanied by his backing band, The Sleeping Souls, which consists of Ben Lloyd, Tarrant Anderson (bass), Matt Nasir and Callum Green (drums).
John Michael Green is an American author, YouTuber, podcaster, and philanthropist. His books have more than 50 million copies in print worldwide, including The Fault in Our Stars (2012), which is one of the best-selling books of all time. Green's rapid rise to fame and idiosyncratic voice are credited with creating a major shift in the young adult fiction market. Green is also well known for his work in online video, most notably his YouTube ventures with his brother Hank Green.
Ursula Dubosarsky is an Australian writer of fiction and non-fiction for children and young adults, whose work is characterised by a child's vision and comic voice of both clarity and ambiguity. She has won nine national literary prizes, including five New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, more than any other writer in the Awards' 30-year history. She was appointed the Australian Children's Laureate for 2020–2021.
Brian Limond (born 20 October 1974), known as Limmy, is a Scottish comedian, author, and Twitch streamer.
Caroline Ann O'Connor is a Helpmann Award-winning, Olivier Award-nominated Anglo-Australian singer, dancer and actress. For her theatre work she has won three Helpmann Awards: Best Female Actor in a Play for Edith Piaf in Piaf in 2001 and the same category for Judy Garland in End of the Rainbow in 2006, and Best Female Actor in a Musical for Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes in 2015.
Jack Thorne FRSL is a British playwright, television writer, screenwriter, and producer.
59 Productions is a Scottish design studio and production company that creates original story-telling experiences for audiences of all types. The offices of the company are located in London and New York City.
My Dad Wrote a Porno was a British comedy podcast hosted by Jamie Morton, James Cooper, and Alice Levine. Published from 4 October 2015 to 12 December 2022, each episode of the podcast featured Morton reading a new chapter of Belinda Blinked, an amateur erotic novel series written by his father under the pen name Rocky Flintstone. Morton, Cooper, and Levine react to the material and provide running commentary. Each episode featured Cooper and Levine hearing the chapter for the first time, whereas Morton had read the chapter beforehand to prepare.
Siobhán McHugh is an Irish-Australian author, podcast producer and critic, oral historian, audio documentary-maker and journalism academic. In 2013 she founded RadioDoc Review, the first journal of critical analysis of crafted audio storytelling podcasts and features, for which she received an academic research award. She is Associate Professor of Journalism (honorary) at the University of Wollongong (UOW). and Associate Professor of Media and Communications (honorary) at the University of Sydney. Her latest book, The Power of Podcasting: telling stories through sound, was published by NewSouth Books in February 2022. A US edition with Columbia University Press is due October 2022.
Claire Armitstead FRSL is a British journalist and author. She is Associate Editor (Culture) at The Guardian, where she has worked since 1992. She is also a cultural commentator on literature and the arts, and makes appearances on radio and television, as well as leading workshops and chairing literary events in the UK and at international festivals. She has judged literary competitions including the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, the PEN Pinter Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Roman Krznaric is an Australian-born public philosopher, whose books have focused on the power of ideas to change society and have been published in over 20 languages. He was named by The Observer as one of Britain’s leading popular philosophers. He is the founder of the world’s first Empathy Museum, Research Fellow of the Long Now Foundation and member of the Club of Rome.