Radio Ballads

Radio Ballads: Songs for Change takes its name from a revolutionary series of radio programmes broadcast on the BBC from 1957 to 1964, a time of rapid change across the UK. Combining song, music and sound effects with the voices and stories of communities, each original Ballad focused on the lived experiences of workers and groups whose voices were otherwise rarely, or never, heard in the media. Building on these histories of collective song and storytelling, this publication shares the process of Serpentine Civic Projects commissioning four new Radio Ballads over sixty years later (2019–23), with artists Sonia Boyce, Helen Cammock, Rory Pilgrim and Ilona Sagar in collaboration with carers, organisers, social workers and residents in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham.

Radio Ballads centres the voices and experiences of people whose care keeps many of us afloat through civic, grassroots and informal networks. Sharing complex and intimate stories of living and working through multiple ongoing crises, these four projects are woven together by eight songs of collaborative work: Working In and Against Systems, Listening, Processing, Embodying, Dreaming, Supporting, Connecting and Voicing. Together, they consider how creative collaboration can open up new spaces to process experiences of mind/body health, domestic abuse, terminal illness, grief and end of life care, and to generate interdependence and collective healing. Exploring new possibilities for us to gather and organise together, Radio Ballads asks: what kinds of collective songs are needed today?