 Good evening, everyone. I hope people can hear us and welcome everybody to this event. I'm Christopher Kramer, I'm the Professor of the Political Economy of Development at SOAS, and I'm here to welcome you all to the fourth event in this SOAS, University of London series called Continuing the Conversation, and SOAS will be hosting more virtual events in the upcoming months. This event, like others, will be recorded, and I'm advised to ask you, if you're so minded to discuss this on social media, please put you use the following hashtags, which I think are spelled out in the chat function on the sidebar. Hashtag SOAS, hashtag SOAS alumni, and hashtag we are SOAS. So today's event will be Dr. Gus Casely Hayford, OBE, in conversation with me, discussing the slightly daunting topic we were given of art, history, Africa, and the world. So Gus and I will have a discussion, we'll chat for maybe 15-20 minutes, and then we will open up for a Q&A, and we'd like you, if you've got questions, please to write them in the chat box to the right, and then we'll try and gather in as many of those as we can. So it gives me enormous pleasure to welcome Dr. Gus Casely Hayford to this event and back to SOAS. Gus, for those of you who might not know enough, is an art and cultural historian who writes, lectures, curates, and broadcasts widely, and particularly on African culture and history. He's perhaps especially well known for his major BBC TV series, The Lost Kingdoms of Africa, if you haven't seen it, find that it's fantastic. These were series that used new archaeological and anthropological research to explore the pre-colonial history of some of Africa's most important kingdoms. Among many other things that we might mention, Gus is a former Executive Director of Arts Strategy for the Arts Council England. He's a former Director of the Institute of International Visual Art, and he's advised the United Nations and the Canadian, Dutch and Norwegian Arts Councils, as well as the Tate Gallery. He initiated and became the Director of Africa 05, which was the largest African arts season ever hosted in the UK, when more than 150 venues collaborated to host more than 1,000 events nationwide. Gus is, Dr. Casely Hayford is now leading the development of a really exciting one of the biggest cultural projects that's been undertaken by a national museum in the UK in recent years, and we'll find out a little bit more about that in a minute. That's the V&A East project, and he has recently returned from being the Director of the National Gallery of African Art at the Smithsonian in Washington. Gus, it's fantastic to welcome you back to SOAS, even if virtually, and to the UK. I think the last time we actually saw each other in person was in the staff common room at SOAS when you were on a short work flight trip back from Washington, and both of those things are kind of strange things to think of, or say now it's a different world, short flights and work trips across the ocean hanging out in the staff common room, and I think that different world is something that we'll probably come to, the implications of that for the world we live in and the work that we in particular are doing, but maybe I could begin with some of the basics, Gus, and I'll ask you because I think I and many of us will want to know a little bit more. If you could tell us a little bit about V&A East, about the origins of this idea, about what stage it's at, and when it's open, it's being built within eye shot and ear shot of where I'm sitting now, but tell us more about V&A East. I love my role at the Smithsonian and when I got a call from the senior team at the V&A, it was probably the only offer I think that would have pulled me away from my role at the National Museum of African Art, because it was to do something which is both daunting and exciting in equal measure, it's to help to deliver a new museum and collection centre in the east of London, and it's an area which was traditionally fairly kind of deprived in the 1850s at the time of the Great Exhibition, which was the forerunner of the V&A, that one of the Great Punch journalists, Henry Mayhew, that he travels in the east of London and he describes it as an area which is utterly rundown, but he also describes it as an area which is absolutely kind of driven by makers, that he finds it this place in which there are all kinds of weavers and carpenters, and it's this engine of creativity which is fueling this transformation of Britain, and it's at this moment in which Britain, London is engaging in this reflection of its place in the world through creative process, and the Great Exhibition becomes a kind of moment in which Britain establishes a new relationship to the world through creativity, and the V&A is one of the results of that, and it's an institution which I've always loved, but this was a chance to create a new iteration of the V&A, but to do it in this bit of London which has been so traditionally neglected, and yet which has produced some of the great creative forces in British cultural history, and I just thought what a fantastic proposition, a chance to build an institution that would house 250,000 objects from the V&A collection, 900 archives in a vast collection centre which is the size of a football field, I stood in it just last week and it is utterly awe-inspiring, it is one of those buildings like when you go into the Great Court of the British Museum that just takes your breath away, and then about 10 minutes walk away a new museum which will be on four floors within which we will be able to animate those works from the collection, as well as other works, new works, as well as commissioning works, my artists, and doing it in this bit of London that has been so traditionally neglected, it was just an offer that I couldn't turn down, so I'm so excited, daunted by the prospect, but so excited. That's fantastic Gus, when's it due to be open to the rest of us, you've been given sneak previews of the building site and so on, but when do we all get to be able to go along? So 2024 will be the date at which the collection centre is due to open, and that is this vast building within which we will house a large proportion of the V&A collection, but it will be unlike any other collection centre in which it will be accessible to anyone, and it's an amazing design that it feels like one has somehow peeled open a collection centre, glass floors, glass walls in a large area of the actual central space, so you can stand in the centre of the building and you can look up and you can look down and you can see this amazing collection quarter of a million objects in a single space, and then a year later in 2025 this amazing new museum designed by McCollum Toomey, which is based on a Valenciaga dress, incredibly beautiful as well, and it's in a constellation of new buildings alongside a new space for the BBC orchestras, Sadler's Wells, a new building which will also be there, a new theatre, and London College of Fashion, a new site for them, and also not too far away a new university college, so a new UCL, so this new suite of institutions all celebrating creativity in different ways, but also at this moment in which post-Brexit, post-Crow vid as we begin to define a new place for Britain in the world, a new space in which creativity is going to have to find ways of bridging the gap between communities, whether that be across oceans or whether that be just locally, because what COVID has done, what Brexit has done is to change geography, and I think that we need institutions that are capable of bridging some of those boundaries. So if we just take the local bit of that, will the new collection and the museum, apart from the historical link, it's really interesting that you were talking about Mayhew and the Great Exhibition and the beginnings of the DNA, will the link refer directly to that and build on it, will it be a major source of local employment, will the collection and the museum reflect that particular East London history and culture in particular ways or not so much? Well, I'm hoping that the disciplines that are explored in the V&A collection are some of the sorts of disciplines that you see reflected in local industry, this is an area which has given birth to large numbers of fashion designers, of architects, of ceramicists, and I am hoping that this space will become a sort of creative repository in which people can dip in and they can use it as a crucible of ideas, but I'm also hoping that for the young, for people who aren't formally engaged in creative education that they're not kind of an art college and they're not professionally kind of engaged in the arts, that for them it might be just an opportunity to see what some of the finest practice across time and across geography is actually like to be in the presence of, and I would hope that that generation who are doing amazing things in so many areas, particularly in helping us to think about how we're going to navigate the digital, that they will be there to help us to think and to consider what new avenues and opportunities for creative practice in these disciplines might actually be, ways in which we can actually make the world feel smaller in this time in which they feel like there are increasing boundaries and barriers to travel and I would really love to engage those communities in helping us to explore our collections and to give them the tools to actually redefine some of these disciplines themselves. I think that is enormously exciting. One thinks that one of the sorts of people who benefited from a local education here in New York, Alexander McQueen, someone who completely took apart the constituent parts of fashion and put them back together in ways that made sense to him and so transformed the whole discipline and I think that there are so many other people who, given the tools, could help us to reconsider so many areas of creative practice and we want to give this younger generation the tools and to do it in a part of London which is incredibly culturally diverse. All of the surrounding boroughs are ethnic majority boroughs. Some of them are deeply under-invested in poor infrastructure and we want to be there to support young people in realising their dreams and doing it in ways that actually work for them. That's fantastic Gus and you mentioned Alexander McQueen and of course there was that brilliant celebration of his work by the VNA a few years ago which is a really astonishing exhibition but you, the other thing that you've been talking about which is so interesting is the role of something like the VNA in a process of Britain trying to know to understand to find its place in the world and there are a couple of things I think interesting about that. I mean one is more generally, you know, everything about who we think we are as communities, as groups of people, as countries, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, the relationships of power within the country and globally. All of these are bound up with issues of memory of what we remember and how we remember it and also what we forget and how we remember it and who chooses that. And it seems to me there's a very particular moment right now, very obviously around BLM and the States and here and so on but there's a sort of opportunity to reshuffle those questions and I wonder what you think about the broader role of galleries, museums and particularly the VNA in contributing to that very important process. The VNA comes out of a particular tradition of museums, you know, that we are enlightenment institutions that we know it's difficult but we have written into our histories, you know, periods in which we were engaged in either tangentially or directly in supporting colonial regimes in actually supporting the hierarchies and the categorizations of peoples and cultures in ways which now feel very uncomfortable and what we have an opportunity of doing today is particularly through our collections is in interrogating some of that and actually doing it in ways which actually empower people who feel particularly genetically connected to the works which are in our collections and helping them to build much more complex and robust interfaces with our collections that are personal sometimes but I think underwritten by a kind of of intellectual integrity which I think can sometimes feel quite distant in museums, you know, that museums they shouldn't just be there to I don't know but very often in museums it can feel like you are there just to learn lessons and I think very often that the people who visit institutions that they have as much if not more to impart about the experience about particular objects as anyone else and I just feel that what I would love to do is to create an environment in which we can use digital tools to actually create environments around objects and collections in which we can all engage of course we have to respect a curatorial authority but around that I would love it if objects become spaces for wider discourse and interactivity that can be personal which may be you know deeply subjective but which will allow us to to realize the kind of contingent nature of what we do but to both speak the poetry of curation but also to underpin it with a kind of meaning that I think sometimes can be lacking and so I would love it if this feels like a partnership with the public in which we are rediscovering these collections, rediscovering and rethinking our connection to this problematic and difficult history, it's not about us actually resolving things in ways that will feel safe, sanitized and comfortable, it's about us actually using our collections to ask some difficult questions and for us to in some way navigate some of this space in ways that may be cathartic to some and for others may actually raise important questions and I think museums shouldn't just be repositories of nice things in which one goes and one reflects and one comes away kind of unchanged, I think occasionally museums need to be spaces in which really robust questions are asked and some of those questions need to be asked and answered by the public themselves in their own way using the spaces that the museums facilitate so that we become crucibles for change, crucibles of catharsis. I'm sorry I think we've lost Chris so please do submit your questions and I will self-moderate. So Chilly Horse has asked what will the opening exhibition be? At the moment we are what four years away from opening and so we aren't in a position to actually say I have some ideas but if you imagine that V&A South Ken that they have had this incredible heritage, this amazing history of Fiorre and McQueen and we want to be able to deliver a level of exhibition that rivals those in kind of name recognition but which does so in an area which will speak to some new audiences that really will speak to some of the local people but also to so many people who wouldn't feel a museum visit to be the natural thing that they would want to do so I'm really excited about developing that program and I at some point hopefully next year will be able to begin to speak publicly about that program. So this is from Sandra Wilson the V&A has very few African artifacts in its collection. How do you hope to address that deficit which is a really good question but one of the things I found because I began my career at the British Museum and we would often look with at the V&A collection I can remember looking at their Ginkers they have you know and thinking wow you know it would be great if we were to acquire you know that Victorian Dandy series when the V&A were acquiring it and so even though traditionally there hasn't been an Africa curator hidden away in a number of different departments there are significant numbers of really really wonderful things around which one can build a really good Africa collection. In the 1950s something called the circulation department was developed at the V&A which was a department which was designed to take the collection out beyond the actual South Ken area and actually take it to the people who were paying for the the institution and it went out across Britain to all the regions and was incredibly popular and the people who conceived and actually ran the circulation department they actually drove an acquisition policy which was about widening the brief and they bought quite a lot of African works and they are now the basis of a very good collection but I want over the course of my tenure to build upon that and we have coming up an African fashion exhibition which I'm really looking forward to but also that we are looking at some major acquisitions and loans which I think will begin to reshape the way in which we see we see the V&A and so yeah a foreign answer I'm guessing a fellow Ghanaian how do we address the concerns issues of artifacts taken in the past and request to have them return to their home countries in Africa and I think that this is another key question and it's something which our director Tristram Hunt has actually taken the lead on in building those relationships and beginning to find the ways of answering some of these really substantive questions and I'm really fortunate when I began my career these are questions which one asked in kind of lower tones because it you know there wasn't really the spaces in which one could engage in these conversations openly and I think but today today Hartwig Fischer Tristram Hunt the directors of all of the major major collections that they that that have large repositories of objects from Africa clone that they are all working in different ways to think about how we create greater equity greater sharing in this particular area and I think that we will live through a time in which this is less of an issue in which both on the continent that there is a new generation of national museums that are are are co-creating exhibitions in which we're sharing expertise and in which that critical thing of in which we are loaning objects and we are building a collection which does not feel like it needs to have the stamp of any single institution on it that is truly you know a global which I think is very much something that we would all love to see and now and I'm sorry I can't get to all of the questions because I'm trying to self moderate and I have never used this system before so I'm just going down as I see them Miles Wichsted, Higus big question to what extent do you think culture and an understanding of heritage can contribute towards the sustainable development goals and in particular the promotional the promotion of peaceful and inclusive societies that's a great question and when I look at the that generation of founders of institutions oh Chris you're back I'm I'm sort of back I think Sirius needs to buy me a new computer and I can't but I can't see I can't actually see Miles's or anybody else's questions in the chat so if you don't mind Gus you're going to have to probably field them until I can see them okay answering Miles's question which was it's a really good one understanding you know how to what extent do you think culture and an understanding heritage culture can contribute to the sustainable development goal and in particular about the promotion of peaceful and inclusive societies and I've served on the board of the National Trust I've worked for the British Museum I've advised Tate I've worked for a number of different major national institutions in Britain and what they all seem to have in common is if you actually go back to their founding objectives they even though they're all driven by this idea of the intrinsic value of the arts of the arts being about something which is about lifting us through beauty they all also were driven by another imperative of wanting to find ways of getting society to to work better of us to cohere better to to drive social cohesion to help to facilitate greater education and opportunity for disadvantaged peoples all of those institutions that they had a transformative component to a social inclusion component to their actual founding thesis and it may well be that now we've confined an awful lot of those kinds of drives to you know you know to our diversity action plans but they were pretty much part of our formal founding objectives and so absolutely with V&A East we are embracing that as key and core you know equity openness you know these will be things that will be absolutely formally part of our founding objectives as well as sustainability we can't create an institution today which does not in some way engage with its responsibility to to to to the world and the environment so it's a really good question and it underpins so much of what I want to see V&A East represent and Afar Hussein how how could we be more effective towards intellectual collection to the participation role in the society and public domain so so how can we make our collections feel more relevant to wider a wider public I'm I'm going to interpret that in that way and and I think for me this is the key question that you know one looks at our collection quarter of a million objects five thousand years of history the responsibility of that and we hold those objects in trust on behalf of the British public and we hold them in trust also on the basis that we try to engage the public in those narratives and so fundamental to what we are here to to do is to actually engage the public is to actually activate those objects through a kind of relationship with our constituency and it's in that space that public institutions become more than just more than just repositories of ideas and nice things it's there that they become active crucibles with the potential of both building and driving social cohesion but also doing that critical thing that we need I think more than ever which is driving change driving driving the potential for real discourse and to do it through a space that feels inclusive and that is what I think great museums can do and if one can do that through beauty I mean wow I think that that's really exciting Gus Nick Westcott who's the director of the Royal Africa Society is asking you what your approach is to to demand the return of cultural cultural objects yes and I did try to answer that that this is something that you know a wide range of of museums are considering at the moment and considering as consortia but also considering individually and when I said the National Museum of African Art that we we actually commissioned a survey that looked at the state of of museums in Africa and we you know it is devastating when one looks at the way in which there are some exquisite museums on the continent of Africa but there are also there is also kind of a vast number which are failing catastrophically and we have to find a way of equalizing that we have to find a way of of sharing of returning of engaging with debate of of exchanging expertise of we have to find a way of opening up the conduits and of creating greater equity I mean it's difficult to work in a sector in which we are trying to celebrate education and expertise which is which are all based around the idea of having a kind of equitable playing field of having opportunity of having a space in which one can share and then for there to be such inequity of delivery and particularly for people who feel genealogically connected to the very materials that we are discussing we have to find ways of equalizing some of that presumably one of the things that underpins some of the difficulties of some of the institutions that you've mentioned is straightforwardly a problem of public finance capacity in some of those countries and do you think that there's more that could be done either by multilateral organizations well-banked so on or bilateral in terms of the newly merged FCO and DFID here in the UK to support the arts the arts cultures museums memorialization within other countries well if you if one looks at the cultural industries in Britain and the high proportion of of GDP that is generated by the cultural sector I would have thought that for well-banked the idea that you know they have culture there as one of their their key their key priorities but it is way down the list and I do feel that a reinvestment in that would really be kind of strategically important at this time and one looks at nations which have gone in that direction and it has yielded you know fantastic benefits I look at you know some of the some of the new galleries some of them commercial one looks at a place like Johannesburg and you know they're in you know there there are a number of commercial galleries one looks at Cape Town you know they're you know Zeitz Mocker doing incredible things you know and then the Norval Foundation just you know another world-class institution not far away and it's amazing how quickly whole sectors can be transformed and across the continent these new institutions have grown simultaneously with a whole new generation of African artists who are doing utterly astounding things rewriting the you know what everyone expected might be possible in terms of in terms of sales in terms of representation in terms of the the way in which they're actually being placed within the big global art fairs so I think the future does not need to be like the past I feel so optimistic about the African art sector and you know I will whilst I'm in this role be really keen to be working with institutions across the continent and doing it to bring the the best practice here but also trying where I can to help to to to share expertise but also just in any way I can to help to transform the opportunities of of the younger generation of curators and artists I mean I think that just what you said just then may may be the beginning of the answers to two of the questions on the right hand side one one one from from Vanessa Kyle about diversity within the workforce of museums and galleries and the other above from Ariki okay about what discourse is what themes you want to use the vna brand and collections to engage with I think that may touch on some of what you were just saying well I I want to you know and I have a responsibility to to try to touch as many people particularly young people as I possibly can through this incredibly accessible and glorious collection and so you know for me I still think back on my first museum experiences as you know wonderful but slightly daunting so my hope is that we can create an environment which is welcoming but at the same time that it offers people a chance from their very initial visit to when they are major practitioners who are celebrated around the world a space in which they can absolutely kind of um execute their dreams that they can feel that we can walk in lockstep with people to ward their aspirations and you know one looks at the great collections and you know that they can often feel somewhat distant they can I can always remember as a young person going into museums and galleries and somehow feeling you know that either it was a privilege to be there or or feeling slightly like um I wasn't actually welcome and I want that absolutely not to be the case this needs to be an environment in which particularly those local people feel like it is there absolutely world-class collections world-class curation but it belongs to those local people and you know one looks back at the history of the sorts of people who come from this bit of London and they've contributed so much to to to the cultural well-being of of Britain to its GDP but they've had so little in return I think this is a tiny reinvestment in a community that have been so long overlooked and so I just feel it's such a privilege to be a part of that narrative. So picking up on that Lewis Tony is asking whether whether there are plans for V&E V&Es to work with UCL East and also the Slade and and also with my own hat on with people working in art history and music and media at SOAS as well if not a little yeah well yes well Slade get absolutely through UCL we will you know we are building a partnership and my hope is that there will be collaborations on courses and all sorts of different programming so we are so privileged to be in this amazing neighbourhood of of incredibly diverse local population but also these very dynamic other institutions who we're going to work together with so that could you imagine the BBC with all of their orchestras one has London College of Fashion with all of its expertise one has Sadler's World's one of the most innovative theatre production companies in the world and all of us with this absolute same aim that we will through excellence inspire a new generation and I want V&Es to be absolutely at the centre of that that this is of course it's about bringing the great experts to V&Es bringing the superstars to V&Es but it's also about giving a platform bringing in audiences who may never have felt welcome in in or comfortable in a museum for them to feel that it's theirs I think that is the exciting thing to build a new kind of museum paradigm in which we can all see ourselves reflected and all feel comfortable I think that is something that if we manage to do that I think it'll be really it'll be something that be revolutionary in the way that Henry Cole the founder of the V&A would have felt very proud that's what he I think he wanted to engage with this idea of making being almost like it being more than a campaign of it being something that he wanted to evangelise about he saw making as being a kind of way of emancipating people from from a lack of professional flexibility having skills in which people can actually realise their own dreams was something that he wanted to to offer to a generation and I would love it if we could find ways of doing that in this moment in which we are empowered through digital tools to offer global solutions that's really exciting to me it's interesting Gus that you know that you've emphasized so much the making history of the area and of course one of the things is more recently is that a lot of that making has disappeared and has been replaced by by living rather than making you know as the residential blocks are displacing some of the some of the rather beautiful old warehouses and stuff but there are also there is also this history of studios of artists working the other thing that you haven't mentioned which is a hotbed of superstars at least according to some people great creativity on field is West Ham I wonder whether you can use that opportunity to read the new audience as well yeah and West Ham that they have huge audiences and we're also kind of adjacent to Westfield one of the biggest shopping centres in in in in Britain so it's there are all of these different kinds of demographers who converge on the old Olympic park and it's to find ways of them not feeling like they need to be exclusive to one another I would love it if this particular cultural area becomes a point of confluence for all of these different demographers and not as a kind of place in which one is going to go and see something strange which feels like a privilege but to go and to go into a place that you can relax in and that you can see yourself occasionally reflected but you can see usually amazing things that are delivered by some of the great creative forces in the world but presented in ways that feel like they are closer to you rather than further away you know that kind of it's great that we reify and we put people and objects on plinths I also want to make them feel like they are accessible and that you could potentially pursue a similar course that it might not be that you can be a creative genius but you can we can all engage in exercising our creative imaginations in different ways and I want this to be a space in which we can answer and ask some of those sorts of questions Lucy is asking how you and your team have managed to keep working on this project during the pandemic? Well I actually flew back to London from Washington DC on the very last plane from DC it was just my cat and myself and I came back and then there was lockdown and my wife and my daughter and I that we are sharing the smallest flat in in our bit of north London I imagine and so when I realized that I thought how am I going to fashion an office and the only space that I could find was is a kind of small linen cupboard which I've converted into my office and you know that is where I work from thankfully three weeks ago we began to open up bits of our office down in east London and I'm sitting now in Plexil which is a shared office space where we'll be working as we begin the transformation of our two spaces and I come in here a few days a week but I think one of the things that the lockdown here it has done is it's changed I think some working practices possibly for good and it's made us realize that we can do this sort of thing and it is enormously effective it's great to speak to people across the world in real time and to engage with communities and it's it's exactly the way in which we want our museum to work that the things that we share by way of ideas can help us to actually in some way overcome distance and overcome difference and that is what will help us to in some way deal with many of the kind of it's not just the post-covid challenges but also for us to think about how we live sustainably in this world that we don't always want to be traveling to far off locations as attractive as it is if we can find ways to engage through digital spaces and to be creative and to be productive I think that's enormously effective and what this period has done is it has constantly our learning in ways that have forced us to actually to deal with things that may have taken generations for us to take on so it'll accelerate changes I mean it's you know you can go to the Vatican or wherever digitally and you can get quite closer and it's and it's great but it's it's not quite great enough so it's not just the quality of the imagery it's probably got to be other technical changes haven't they to presenting collections and material to do what you want and reduce just yes yes yeah well I'm I'm enormously excited and daunted by this responsibility and and it's in part you know that it's not often that one gets a chance to engage with the possibility of creating a new public institution and what publics are demanding of their institutions has changed over the last hundred and fifty years and we need to deliver a kind of museological proposition that speaks to 21st century needs you know what is it that you know Gen Z are demanding you know in their cultural space that it is something utterly different than than than than than my generation so we've got a lot to learn from our audiences and so I want to spend time listening and I want the institution to be reflective and dynamic and open to the possibility of change because it's such an exciting time and the institutions that get this right I think will create a different kind of museological proposition and I think that is enormously exciting there's a question from Kenneth at the Africa Center and it's mainly our last question and and Kenneth's asking you know the question is not just about changing narratives but but who owns and who gets to own and how those narratives I don't know what do you have anything to absolutely and one of the great privileges is that we are well it's we're living through this period of of great challenge you know that as we come out of lockdown and our economy is is going through a period of of some contraction and we you know I feel very fortunate in which you know being in a position in which we are part of an institution which is you know like Kenneth which is is is is growing and is trying to employ new new staff members and so for us we feel that we have a responsibility to make sure that that those teams that they reflect this new moment and this new generation and so I am hopeful and I you know that we will find a way of of engaging with this opportunity because I think anything else would be deemed to have you know to have been a failure that we need to find ways of employing not just the same sorts of people that one sees in so many institutions but it's not just about demographic profile it's also about mindset that we need to create a new moment for museums in which we can we can really engage with that generation many of whom you know Gen Z you see them turning away from you know so much cultural practice that is produced by the older generation because they feel somehow that we've let them down and I want to find a way of building a bridge across between us and that generation which is and then there is a generation which is driven by the idea of of of kind of cultural integrity you know that they embrace the ideas of sustainability inequity really fundamentally and I want to see us doing the same institutionally and one looks back across the history of the development of national institutions you look at the initial development of the British Museum of the V&A of the National Trust and they are driven by that same moral compunction and I think that as as we found our new museum it has to be as well as an institution which is underwritten by by excellence it has to be underwritten by equity and it has to be underwritten by an ethical code those things have to go together thank you Gus I think we're pretty much out of time I think these are the issues that you've raised and that people have asked you about that they're really important issues they're part of a an ongoing and open conversation that I hope that we will be continue to be involved in I think you've given us some some really inspiring thoughts about the new project about V&A East and it's it's placed specifically in London but also the V&A's role London the UK's place in the world more broadly as we try to to rethink through that it's clearly an incredibly exciting project and I think we're amazingly lucky that you came back for this we really look forward to to seeing this come to fruition and and opening it's great you're back and and I personally and I know all of us very much look forward to to staying in touch with you and and seeing you digitally and hopefully in in person soon but Gus I'd like to on behalf of everybody thank you very very much for joining us and to thank everybody who's joined in who's listened who's posted questions thank you all remind everybody that this session is recorded if you want to watch back over parts of it and on my part to apologize for my technical utter failure earlier on but lovely to reconnect but thank you Chris and thank you everyone I've looked at so many of the names of people who are people who I love adore respect and it's so wonderful to be in touch with you even if it be you know remotely in this way and please you know be in touch and come and see us at V&A East and support so as it's an institution that made me that I absolutely I adore and I cannot think of ways of repaying the investment that it's it's made in me and so you know if there are ways in which you can support so as you know it would make me so happy if that were the result of this evening it's an institution that I feel so privileged to have been a part of and thank you again Chris you've been throughout my career such a supporter and you know I'm so grateful to you for your friendship for your loyalty and just the inspirational work that you do at SOAS you know it sets a bar sets you know shines a light for a generation and I just feel you know SOAS it might be that we're going through a challenging time but what it does is so important and I feel so privileged to have been to have had the benefit of an education there and I hope that many other students will also have that benefit over many generations to come. Thanks Gareth we're we are all at SOAS hugely grateful for your support and that of everybody like you that's great thank you so much. Thank you so much.