One afternoon while setting up for the V&A East Museum’s new DJ residency, upperground, I ran into a friend from university entering the Why We Make Galleries. She’d come to visit the museum and see the exhibition and hadn’t planned on staying, but I convinced her to come back for that week’s upperground set in the evening, allowing us to catch up while discovering experimental, new music. Our serendipitous meeting on that day showed me that young people from all over the city are already eager to engage with V&A East, and that evenings like this can pull them into an exciting, less formal relationship with the museum, beyond the exhibitions themselves.
The upperground series was launched this August in dialogue with The Music is Black: A British Story exhibition. Each Thursday, a different DJ, selector, or music practitioner is invited to activate the museum’s upper ground space and build a set that reflects their own musical language. The residency tests what happens when a museum invites club culture and live performance into normally static gallery spaces, and what becomes possible, or complicated, once those two functions collide.
The space itself contributes to the ease of this union. Illuminated by floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the upper ground floor feels less like a traditional gallery space, especially once filled with music and dancing crowds. By inviting the public into this space, they are encouraged to not only connect with the music, as representations of black diasporic creative production, but also with one another.
Each artist is given creative control over how they activate the space, including lighting, staging, or even similar smaller activations they want to build around their set. When the Black, queer DJ collective Polyjammeorus took over the space on the 13th of August, they organised a zine-making workshop discussing what Black British music meant to the public. In this way, alongside a fun, diverse set that moved through Afro tech, dancehall, amapiano, garage, house, and more, upperground artists promoted the creative expression of the attendees themselves and an intellectual engagement with black music.
upperground prompts the question of how museums can be more open and inviting to young people, focusing especially on welcoming the black, queer, youth in the area. By showcasing black talent from around London within the music scene and proposing a free, non-ticketed event to see them perform, an array of different demographics were brought together unified under a love for fun music, dancing, and engaging with like-minded peers.
Interning at the V&A East this summer, and helping coordinate upperground, has taught me a lot about what representation in a museum actually looks like in practice, and how to champion untold and underacknowledged stories in a way that is both interesting and applicable cross-generationally. As a young Black woman from the area myself, I understand the importance of artistic representation, and I am grateful for the opportunity to be a facilitator of that representation for others. This experience has left me more curious about what the local cultural landscape could look like if more institutions worked this way.
As a pilot series, the artists upperground has hosted move through a diverse array of musical histories, diasporas, and scenes, testing to what extent the public are open to engaging with museums in this way, and whether one museum space can hold that range and maintain the individuality of each unique sound and artist. This makes me wonder what a museum can decode about itself and who it is for, when outsiders are welcomed in to lead public programmes. Ultimately, alongside The Music is Black exhibition, which tells the story of the multitudes of black contributions to the global music scene, upperground sets a stage for the continuation of those many different stories into their own futures.