Culture is Ordinary

Spring 2021 – ongoing

Culture is Ordinary marks the centenary of cultural theorist, socialist and educator Raymond Williams who, born in the village of Pandy in the Black Mountains in 1921, became a key thinker on politics, culture and society. In his essay ‘Walking Backwards into the Future,’ Williams asks how we can look to the future whilst being so absorbed in the needs of the present. He invites us to think about the language of this work: ‘how many of the words we use to define our intentions have a relationship to the past: recovery, rehabilitation, rebuilding.’ 

Across 2021, Peak is developing a series of dialogues with an assembly of artists, curators, writers and thinkers to imagine other possibilities for facing our future. We’re setting out to explore collective strategies for cultivating response-ability, working with interdisciplinary creative practice to imagine sustainable rural futures in the Welsh Borders region and beyond.

Through reading groups, gatherings, writing commissions, exhibitions and groups supported by Peak - including Welsh language futures group Pegwn and youth advisory group sPeak - Culture is Ordinary will take shape as a hybrid programme at peakcymru.org and Abergavenny Train Station. 

At Abergavenny Station, our long-term partnership with Transport for Wales launches with the opening of Platfform 2 - a project space which, across the coming year(s), will host workshops, discussions, residencies, film programmes and exhibitions with artists, writers and thinkers. We’re beginning with another partnership, working with Art Night to stage a screening programme of film works by Alberta Whittle, which opens June 18th 2021.

Culture is Ordinary was held through walking backwards into the future, a trio of reading groups in May 2021 led by Dr Kirsti Bohata, Kandace Siobhan Walker and Esyllt Lewis. Readings explored our response-ability to environmental ecologies and climate change in the context of debates about land use, rural communities and the relationship between country and city; Raymond Williams’ idea of ‘a sharing socialism’ and the necessity of collectivity, imagination and dreams in radical struggle and change; and ideas of language, landscape, play and loss, in a time of overlapping crises and culture-war binaries, testing ways of creating a dynamically multilingual space for dialogue. You can learn more and find PDFs of the collated readings here.

With thanks to author Richard King who initiated the idea of a Raymond Williams Centenary programme in the Black Mountains. 

Culture is Ordinary was supported by Arts Council of Wales via an R&D Grant and Connect & Flourish funding.