I had the privilege of working with the lovely Prof Martin Willis and an amazing support crew at Cardiff University and Cardiff Council as part of the UK’s Being Human Festival 2024. Being Human, as the blurb will tell you, is an annual, national celebration of research in the humanities. It aims to:
celebrate and demonstrate the ways in which the humanities inspire and enrich our everyday lives, help us to understand ourselves, our relationships with others, and the challenges we face in a changing world.
It’s also sends a big Bronx cheer to neolibs, tech-bros and other philistines who claim you’ll never get anywhere with an arts degree.
Martin is interested in sleep in the past (as part of his expertise in Victorian literature) and I’m fascinated by sleep in the future (among other things), so we thought that the two of us collaborating might result in something interesting.
We created an exhibition titled “Sound, Sleep and the City” which sought to explore the differences and commonalities in people’s attempts to get a decent sleep throughout history. We designed a series of posters featuring quotations from literature down the ages in which people complained about the noise and bustle of the city, from brass bands to pet donkeys to steam engines. We sourced some contemporary images and included prompt questions to get visitors thinking about their own situations and provided sticky-notes and pens for them to add their comments.
We also set up a large, interactive map of a sleep-positive future Cardiff which people could add their ideas to using pens or pictures cut from magazines. And to make the most of our beautiful setting at Cardiff’s Bute Park Visitors Centre, a colleague took participants on an outdoor listening walk in which they quietly absorbed the sounds of nature – and humanity – in the middle of a busy work-day.
It posed rather a challenge to my visual communication skills to make the event material bilingual (Cymraeg and Saesneg) but I was delighted with how the exhibition looked and the event overall. The feedback we received from the festival’s organisers was very positive and they even gave it to us in the form of lovely infographics like this:
