When the Museum Becomes a Space for Emotions: Inside the Biosphère’s Emolab

Montréal’s Biosphère has created an exhibition dedicated entirely to climate emotions — and the story of how it came to exist is almost as compelling as the exhibition itself.

The moment that led to the Biosphère’s most ambitious recent project was not a strategic planning session or a market research report. It was a meeting that went unexpectedly off-script. Staff were gathered to brainstorm the future of a gallery space that needed refreshing. And then, for reasons that Eve-Lyne Cayouette Ashby, the museum’s head of exhibitions, programmes and education, still can’t fully explain, something shifted.

“We started sharing our feelings, our emotions about environmental issues and the crisis. We started opening up amongst ourselves.”

It was, she reflects, the first time this group of museum professionals — people who spent their working lives communicating about environmental challenges — had ever spoken honestly to each other about how those challenges made them feel. “Suddenly, it became obvious that it was the elephant in the room.”

That moment of unexpected honesty became the seed of Emolab: a laboratory dedicated to climate emotions, designed specifically for young people aged 16 to 25, and opened at the Biosphère in November 2024.

A Science Whose Time Has Come

The Biosphère is no ordinary museum. Housed inside the iconic geodesic dome designed by Richard Buckminster Fuller for Expo ’67 — once the American Pavilion, now a striking presence on Île Sainte-Hélène in the middle of the St. Lawrence River — it has been dedicated to environmental issues since 1995, and joined the Space for Life museum complex in 2021. It approaches its subject through natural sciences, the arts, and community innovation alike.

When the team began exploring the territory of climate emotions after that pivotal meeting, they found both a public appetite and a growing body of research waiting for them. Previous audience consultations had revealed that young people in particular wanted museums to acknowledge the emotional dimension of the environmental crisis — not just the science, but the feelings the science provokes. And researchers, they discovered, were increasingly focused on precisely this intersection.

“There was an emerging science,” says Cayouette Ashby. “Researchers are looking more and more at that topic, and the research is fascinating.”

Eco-anxiety had entered public conversation. But the Biosphère team quickly learned that the emotional landscape of the climate crisis is far richer — and more varied — than that single term suggests.

Built With Young People, Not Just For Them

The consultation process that shaped Emolab was unusually thorough. Rather than designing an exhibition about youth and then inviting young people to experience it, the Biosphère went directly into secondary schools, colleges, and primary classrooms to ask a fundamental question: how should we address this? What do you actually need from an exhibition that tries to help you cope?

The answers shaped every design decision that followed.

Museum educator Annick Boivin, who developed the educational programming for Emolab, was clear about the tone the exhibition needed to strike. Climate emotions are too often framed exclusively as burden — anxiety, despair, overwhelm. “We did not want that to be the focus of the exhibit. We want to talk about climate emotion in a caring and empathic manner.”

The result is an exhibition that deliberately widens the emotional palette. “There are lots of emotions that we should be welcoming,” says Boivin. “We can be proud, we can be hopeful, we can be empathic, we can be motivated.” Even responses that might seem like obstacles — denial, avoidance, scepticism — are treated with nuance rather than dismissal. Denial, Boivin explains, is often a normal first response to something overwhelming. “But if you stay in that state too long, then it’s detrimental.”

A Journey Through Four Zones

Emolab is structured as a progression, moving visitors through four distinct zones that shift in atmosphere and colour as the emotional journey develops.

The first zone opens with a wall of authentic testimonies — drawings and reflections gathered from people of different backgrounds — inviting visitors to locate themselves within the spectrum of climate feeling before engaging with anything more didactic. A voting screen lets visitors indicate which testimonies resonate most, making visible the simple, reassuring fact that others share their experience.

From there, the exhibition moves through the harder terrain — the media representations of crisis, the physical health impacts, the cascade of consequences that link ecological disruption to human life. An interactive game connects climate change consequences with their effects on human wellbeing: changes in animal ecology linked to increased exposure to malaria or Lyme disease, for instance. This zone is deliberately unsettling. “It was meant to be a little bit of a shock,” Boivin acknowledges, “to remind us that climate change is an emergency.”

The third zone offers a timeline that traces the parallel histories of climate science and the science of emotions — two disciplines that converge, around the 1990s, into what we now recognise as eco-anxiety. Mediator Merlin Guerrero finds this timeline one of the most powerful tools for connection: it gives him a way to share his own experience, including the memory of the 2019 climate march in Montréal, when Greta Thunberg was present. “In that moment, I was only present and really hopeful and really happy. So it’s also these emotions that we need to realise that we can have.”

The final zone is calmer, greener, and deliberately slower. This is where solutions live — strategies for emotional resilience, both individual and collective. Visitors linger here. They read, they draw, they talk. It is, says Guerrero, his favourite place to have real conversations.

Meeting Visitors Where They Are

The mediation approach in Emolab is as carefully considered as the exhibition design. Marie Jouan, who coordinates the Biosphère’s public-facing team, worked with outside experts to train mediators in how to navigate a space that touches on deeply personal experience without overstepping into therapy.

The guidance they received was grounded and practical: start with genuine exchange rather than instruction; share your own emotions to open space for others; listen actively; and — crucially — never push people to speak. “Finding the right balance between having a nice discussion and exchange, but also respecting people’s silence in order for them to reflect on their own as well.”

Guerrero describes his approach as one of radical presence. He introduces himself not as an authority on climate science but as a human being who also lives with climate change and its emotional weight. “The fact that I will present myself also as a human that has emotions about it, and I will share that — then it will open up the discussion way more easily.”

The exhibition draws visitors from many different cultural and national backgrounds, and Guerrero finds this diversity enriching rather than complicating. Climate emotion, it turns out, is both universal and particular. Boivin gives a simple, striking example from the Canadian context: the fear of snowlessness. “Maybe in 20 years, it will not snow anymore in Montréal. This will affect a lot of people because it’s cultural. We live in Canada. We need the snow.”

Nature as the Final Lesson

For school groups, Emolab extends beyond the museum walls. The Biosphère sits at the edge of Parc Jean-Drapeau, one of Montréal’s most beautiful urban woodlands, and the team has made deliberate use of this proximity. After completing the exhibition, students head outside for a structured activity in nature — a direct experience of one of the strategies for coping with climate emotions that the exhibition advocates.

For many urban young people, it is their first real encounter with a natural environment. “It’s a skill to develop,” says Boivin, “to teach them to slow down, use their senses to connect with nature.”

The reasoning is both scientific and something older. “There’s an old thing that says, when you learn about something, you come to love it. And when you love something, you want to protect it.”

In finding ways to help young people feel their feelings about the climate crisis — rather than suppress them or be overwhelmed by them — the Biosphère is doing something quietly radical. It is treating emotional literacy not as a distraction from environmental action, but as one of its foundations.

Eve-Lyne Cayouette Ashby, Marie Jouan, Annick Boivin, and Merlin Guerrero presented this work at the Museums & Wellness Summit 2026. The Biosphère is located in Montréal, Canada.