This month some colleagues and I are starting a new ‘good sex’ knowledge exchange project but this time, instead of making short films that reanimate research data we are going to be writing and performing songs.
The project involves researchers from the University of Sussex, musicians from Brighton youth music project Rhythmix, a group of young women and a practitioner from Brighton based youth organizations Safety net. The aim will be to engage the young women who take part in the project in a music-making-research journey that ends up with public performances in London and Brighton.
The project is part of a public engagement initiative linked to The Wellcome Collection’s fabulous sounding Institute of Sexology Exhibition that is due to open next month. The exhibition looks at the work of historical figures such as Marie Stopes, Sigmound Freud and Marcus Hirschfeld who studied the science of sex. Opening on 20th November the exhibition will include work by contemporary artists such as Zanele Muholiwho who uses photography to raise awareness of hate crimes towards lesbian women in South Africa or Sharon Hayes who has made a short film about a young women’s college in the US in which she asks the young female students whether they think they are having the same sort of sex as their mothers had.
As part of the public engagement activities linked to the exhibition The Wellcome Collection have set up 5 sex-research-song-writing hubs across the UK. In each location researchers, musicians and young people will work together to carry out research about sex and sexuality and use this as the inspiration for writing and performing songs. Young people from each hub will perform songs locally and at the Roundhouse Theatre in London and some of the songs will also be recorded and included in the Institute of Sexology exhibition.
Each hub has a different focus: one will look at sex, gender and relationships using existing song lyrics, another is working with LQBTQ youn g people and another is creating a new sex survey. Our hub kicks off next week and is focussed on sex and social change. At the moment we are gathering together the ‘data’ that we will we be working with to try and reanimate using music and song-writing. We have interview data from the groundbreaking Women Risk and Aids Project that was conducted in the 1980s, survey and interview data from the contemporary period from my own PhD research and archive materials – personal testimonies from the Mass Observation Archive, songs from Salt n Peppa (you know the one!) and Nina Simone and short films about AIDS produced at the height of the 1980s AIDS crisis. Let’s see how it goes!
The 'Good sex' project 