This week’s course, led by Frances Davis, has further expanded my thinking around place-responsive curation. Her presentation on ATLAS Arts—a dispersed art organisation across Skye, Raasay, and Lochalsh—highlighted how curating outside traditional institutional spaces allows emotional, geographic, and cultural specificities to inform both form and audience engagement. The multi-sited exhibition Samhla (2024) by Lauren Gault, especially its version installed at the Staffin Dinosaur Museum and now shown online, demonstrated how location can become an emotional amplifier or disrupter. These ideas deeply influenced the way I began reimagining the curatorial possibilities of my own site: The Tap Music Lounge(EH3 9DE) in Edinburgh.
Just as ATLAS Arts embeds storytelling and cultural memory into its rural settings, this curatorial project resists institutional neutrality. It prioritizes site specificity, not only in geography but in emotional ecology. The Tap Music Lounge is not a vessel for artworks—it is a character in the story. By activating ordinary surfaces and sensory experiences (sound, taste, light), the exhibition becomes a shared emotional laboratory. Like Samhla’s multi-sited exhibition that gave voice to Skye’s layered histories, this project treats emotional fragmentation as a legitimate form of knowing, sharing, and healing.
To extend the curatorial dialogue, a Common Room (EH3 9DH) nearby has been identified as a potential site for post-exhibition discussions and reflective gatherings. Here, visitors can revisit materials, share responses, or simply decompress—mirroring how Samhla used multiple sites across North Skye to decentralize authority and diversify emotional access.
Visual Materials & Curatorial Manifesto
Spatial Comparison
Figure 1: Oslo National Museum’s exhibition layout 
Figure 2: Proposed layout for The Tap Bar
Figure 3: Simulated Wooclap emotional mapping results.
Figure 4: All-round shooting of the Common room
Video of the Common Room
References
Bilbao Yarto, Ana. Curating Beyond the Exhibition: Transformative Practices in Contemporary Art. London: Routledge, 2021.
Smith, Terry. Thinking Contemporary Curating. New York: Independent Curators International, 2012.
ATLAS Arts. Strategic Plan 2023–2028. https://www.atlasarts.org.uk
Wooclap Interactive Platform. 2025. Accessed March 14, 2025. https://www.wooclap.com.
