Sex Across Timelines
We facilitated our third workshop on Saturday 30th November 2024 in the Palmer Studio at the lovely Hoxton Hall. Following on from a very successful workshop examining the specifics of the UK sex education system we were buzzing with ideas for what could come next. Our main drawback however was finding a tether between each workshop. What unites all of our workshops is a creative exploration of sex and sex education, however we felt we were lacking structure and direction as a whole. We put our heads together over a series of intensive brainstorming sessions to devise a much stronger, focussed overall picture of the workshop series and landed on the idea of time and timelines. What makes the concept of Reanimating Data so exciting for us is the idea of multiple timelines being in conversation with one another. By exploring a selection of interviews from the WRAP Project Archive we are reanimating these words within the context of the present day and giving them a liveness upon which to create new work and initiate new discussions.
We decided therefore the structure of the workshop would be based around constructing a timeline using each creative exercise in the workshop. By the end we had a huge variety of materials hanging on the timeline: questions, segments from the interviews, data poems and free writing to name a few. Circling back to the idea that multiple times are existing at once, we wanted to round the workshop off by making personal time capsules. Participants were allowed to deconstruct the timeline however they wished and add material to their time capsules. We focussed on the ‘message in a bottle’ idea using glass bottles which could be filled up and decorated on the outside. Currently we hope to display these time capsules in a special Sexy Pigeons exhibition next year – the idea being to add an element of the future into our timeline and revisiting these ideas in a year’s time.
In comparison to our previous workshops, we allowed ourselves to sit with the archive interviews for much longer in order to allow participants to fully digest the material and get to know the women from their interviews. The reading took place whilst participants were asked to ‘body map’ facts/questions/observations onto a separate piece of paper. We read some of our questions out to the group, which generated discussions around ‘can we really know who and what we want to be at 14?’, ‘how can smaller communities be reached and empowered?’ and ‘when is the chain of misinformation broken in sexual mystery?’. Despite the decades between us and these women, we found just how relevant so many of our questions still were today, which led us to reflect on the levels of stigma that still exist within sex education, and communicating with young people.
One participant in their freewriting piece wrote:
‘would their conservatism help my heart and would my recklessness have helped their souls’
Otts found before this she had been thinking in a linear direction, asking what these women could learn from us in 2024, but this completely rejigged her thought process to consider the value of what we could learn from them. Their lived experiences vary hugely – for instance we were able to learn a huge amount from ‘Ruth’ growing up in a travelling community. She did not experience a mainstream education and says in her interview ‘I live in me own world”. The effect of being fairly isolated growing up led to quite fixed, narrow views of sex where it had no association with pleasure or connection, and was equated only with reproduction and something to do once married. Her particular testimony highlighted to us the importance of intersectional education. We discussed our belief that these intersections should not only include sexuality, gender, ethnicity and disability but also different community perspectives. In other words the responsibility to teach sex education should not only come from one source as this is what can lead to misinformation and bias. How do we combat this when by default certain communities are more isolated and separated than others to ensure those young people are still given autonomy and a positive, informative sex education?
We really enjoyed using this structure for our workshop and hope to repeat a similar workshop in January. We are so fortunate to have public access to so many interviews, and we want to include as many different perspectives and narratives as possible in our workshops. We also want to build more time capsules as this was a lovely way to wind down and reflect on the workshop as a whole.
Some lovely testimonies and reflections we received from participants on the workshop included:
- ‘challenged, refreshed, healed’
- ‘happy and contented (rare)’
- ‘so cathartic to place messages/reminders for myself in a bottle to know I could open that up in the future’
We love going on this journey with participants and can’t wait for the year of workshops we have ahead of us!
Until next time…
Sexy Pigeons xx
