Empathy and Over-Identification: An Artist Residency at the Foundling Museum

Paper presentation at the SLSAeu Conference “Empathies” at the University of Basel, Switzerland on the panel 'Empathy and Children'.

Children are often voice-less in the preservation of their history. This process is generally undertaken by adults on behalf of the children. Many scholars still fail to differentiate histories of ‘children’, which concern actual practices of young people, from histories of ‘childhood’ that are ideological concepts adults hold of children.

As part of an artist residency at the Foundling Museum, Taylor led a series of workshops with children aged between 7-14 years old. The aim behind the sessions was to explore the contemporary child’s empathetic connection to the historical foundling child. The sessions revealed the problematic nature of empathy, as it leads to an over-identification of the past.

Empathy may be “rhetorically productive not in spite of but because of the dangers that it is prone” (Lynch 1998: 7). In heritage practices, empathy should to be approached with critical awareness as it may re-establish what the visitor already believes so that the process becomes a rehearsal (Smith 2016: 12). Children have been regarded as passive in heritage-making (Smith 2013: 122), but this position must be questioned and undone. Through action – be it drama or art-making – the child questions and gains an understanding of the past, thus becoming active in the heritage process.

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