Exhibitions & Events
A central exhibition, I’m Not Okay: A Retrospective of Emo, opened at the Barbican Music Library in September 2024, running through to February 2025. The exhibition explored the aesthetics, emotion and cultural significance of Emo, showcasing objects, photography and stories collected through the project. With a strong response from audiences of all ages, it served as a vital platform to test how youth-driven crowdsourced heritage could be presented in a major public setting.
Beyond London, the Museum engaged audiences at cultural festivals and outdoor events throughout the year. These included Classic Car Boot Sale (April), We Invented the Weekend (Salford, June), We Out Here Festival (Dorset, August), and Somers Town Festival (Camden, July). At each event, the team set up pop-up scanning stations, invited archive suggestions, and held informal conversations with attendees about their memories of growing up.
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Beyond London, the Museum engaged audiences at cultural festivals and outdoor events throughout the year. These included Classic Car Boot Sale (April), We Invented the Weekend (Salford, June), We Out Here Festival (Dorset, August), and Somers Town Festival (Camden, July). At each event, the team set up pop-up scanning stations, invited archive suggestions, and held informal conversations with attendees about their memories of growing up.
Towards the end of the year’s programming, we held a series of Open Archive Days to showcase the collections and progress made:
- 2nd December 2024: New Camden Museum, Archival Multi-Media exhibition
- 21st December 2024: Young People’s Archive Open Day, in collaboration with Photofusion
- 13th February 2025: Archive Tour with Yeliz.
The standout open day was the Archive Tour on 13th February 2025 in our Vauxhall offices. The event invited the public behind the scenes to experience what it means to care for a growing cultural collection. Alongside open access to objects and archive tours, over 30 participants took part in a hands-on conservation activity led by our archivist, Yeliz. Using specialist materials, the public were taught how to make archival “sausages and eggs” — protective enclosures and packing supports that help preserve fragile items, and this went down particularly well!
Whether in a music library, a festival field, or a studio workspace, these events brought the Museum’s work into public view and allowed people to connect with the collection on their own terms.