The Project

Sophia Rosen Fouladi

Sophia is one half of Sexy Pigeons. She is an actor, director and creative facilitator from South East London. Sophia’s work strives to uplift unrepresented stories, and to find the joy in both difference and coming together. They want to create art that makes us feel inspired, empowered and honestly just feel really good about ourselves. Whilst in the Women’s Theatre Society at Manchester University, Sophia worked with a researcher from the Reanimating Data Project to devise a group performance inspired by the project material. It completely transformed how they consider sex and relationships in their own life, and how we communicate and pass on these lessons to others. Sex and relationships are such a huge exciting part of life and yet we’re often told to feel shameful and secretive of them. Well ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! Sophia is on a mission with Otts to change how we talk about sex and relationships, so generations to follow can feel loud and proud about their sexuality.

Ottilie is the other half of Sexy Pigeons. She is a creative facilitator and actor from South East London. Otts currently runs immersive drama workshops in preschools and nurseries with Play Phonics to help children learn their phonics through theatre. She uses creative approaches to explore issue-based work, and has been developing her facilitation skills over the past year as a voluntary member of Tender’s youth board - a charity acting for healthy relationships and the prevention of domestic abuse. Otts is particularly passionate about embracing body neutrality - a lens through which bodies aren’t put on a pedestal as the most important thing about ourselves. Her favourite hobby is attending monthly classes of the body positive life drawing class Bodylovesketchclub - both modelling and sketching and she would encourage absolutely anyone to join! She is determined to make sex education more accessible through creativity and is so proud to have co-founded this project with Saph to help continue this conversation and empower others.

Cum on Down!

Our current workshop series, Cum on Down!, invites participants along to a creative exploration of a huge variety of sex and relationships topics. Our approach to this work is playful, open, honest and authentic. We are interested in queering the conversation - looking outside the cis-heteronormative lens - towards a brighter future of sex education in this country, inclusive of all sexualities and relationship models.

The Sexy Pigeons believe in an arts based approach to sex and relationship conversations, as so often this makes the work more accessible. You may have a feeling or thought that can only be conveyed through poetry, or a sketch or even a piece of movement - and we love to see self expression through a whole host of media. We also love to have visual representations of our work and discussions. Check out our gallery for a little glimpse into previous workshops and creations

The Reanimating Data Project

We work in partnership with the Reanimating Data Project. This is a collaboration between academics, archivists and activists interested in young women’s sexual identities, ethics and politics. The project works with a set of interviews collected in the late 1980s as part of a social research study entitled ‘The Women, Risk and AIDS Project’. We share an interest in how sexual identities have evolved and continue to evolve, therefore began to incorporate a small selection of these interviews into each of our own workshops. We are fascinated by how different timelines can be interwoven: how the past teaches us about the present, and how the context of the present allows us to reflect on the past. The interviews work as both a catalyst for discussion, and also as a reminder of the ever-changing nature of sexual identities and politics in this country. They therefore really help us to generate new ideas and directions in our work.

You can read more about the project here:

Women Risk and AIDS Project Interviews - Public access to the archive in which you can find hundreds of interviews with young women from 1989-1990.

Reanimating Data Project - This website gives you information about the project and the team, access to various academic publications and much more.