Radio Ballads

On view at Serpentine (31 March – 29 May 2022) and Barking Town Hall and Learning Centre (2-17 April 2o22), Radio Ballads presented new film commissions alongside paintings, drawings and contextual materials that share each project’s collaborative research process.

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What are the sounds of care, and how do we listen and hold them?

Radio Ballads, showing simultaneously at Serpentine and the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (LBBD), shares a series of collaborative commissions which explore stories about labour and who cares for whom, and in what way. Over the past three years, artists Sonia Boyce, Helen Cammock, Rory Pilgrim, and Ilona Sagar have collaborated with social workers, carers, organisers, and communities across LBBD. Four films and bodies of research have emerged from these long-term artistic processes.

Building on Serpentine’s ongoing critical investigation of the role of artists in political and civic life, Radio Ballads asks how art practices can become part of systemic transformation. The project is also part of LBBD’s New Town Culture programme: a ground-breaking initiative that aims to embed artists within core social care services and explores how artistic processes can reframe the work of social care.

Lineages of Listening

Radio Ballads takes its name from a revolutionary series of radio programmes, broadcast on the BBC from 1957-64: a time of rapid change across the UK. Created by Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, and Charles Parker, these eight programmes combined song, music and sound effects with the stories of communities. Each original Ballad focussed on the lived experiences and resistance of workers and groups whose voices were rarely or never heard in the media. The four new Radio Ballads commissions build on this history. Produced in the wake of twelve years of austerity and amid the ongoing dismantling of the UK care sector, the projects were sustained through multiple national and global crises, and against the backdrop of continued systemic racism and ableism.

The urgency of the stories within Radio Ballads has only increased as the COVID-19 pandemic compounded social inequity and underlined how those who do the work of care are often undervalued and insufficiently supported. Centring the voices and experiences of social care workers – and of people receiving and giving care through more informal networks – the artworks in the Radio Ballads exhibition share complex and intimate stories of living and working in our current moment.

Developed in a time of ongoing recovery, Radio Ballads considers how artistic practices, and creating space for imagination and joy, can support people to reflect on and process lived experiences, including social care, mental health, domestic abuse, terminal illness, end of life care, trauma, and loss. The four projects work with questions of what resources we need and what keeps us connected. Radio Ballads listens to testimonies; reflects on complex issues involving trauma, accountability and systems that perpetuate harm; and contemplates new possibilities for us to navigate the future together with care.

Each project draws on the methods and technologies used in the original Radio Ballads; listening deeply to the testimony of those with lived experience, discerning different registers and qualities of voice, collaborative songwriting and storytelling, and techniques of audio stitching or montage.

Shared Stories, Shared Songs

Ballads can describe poems or narratives set to song, which were traditionally passed on from person to person, meaning they were usually changeable and lost individual authorship. Emerging in medieval Europe, for centuries ballads were a primary and highly accessible source of information, sharing newsworthy events across divisions of class, education, gender, and age. Ballads were closely linked to the process of grieving and sharing grief publicly. They were usually written or performed in the first-person, offering a framework for their singers to interpret the world around them.

Radio Ballads asks how we can again start to understand, listen, learn, and heal through collective storytelling. In a time of multiple crises, the project explores how voices – individual and collective – can illuminate structures of care and allow us to reflect on conditions of life and the effects of labour in our communities. Singing has transformed the experience of work and change since history began – but what kind of collective songs are needed now? Developed through years of relationship-building, and the generosity of many collaborators, the works in Radio Ballads feature the voices of the people whose work and care keeps many of us afloat.

Find out more about the Radio Ballads Exhibition here.

Map of Radio Ballads Relationships