Rebuild, Emma Daman Thomas, 2021
‘Let us face the future’ said a famous manifesto. But how exactly, at any actual time, are we supposed to do that?’
In his essay ‘Walking Backwards into the Future,’ Raymond Williams asks how we can look to the future whilst so absorbed in the needs of the present, with even our language rooted in the past: ‘how many of the words we use to define our intentions have a relationship to the past: recovery, rehabilitation, rebuilding.’
During May 2021 Peak co-hosted a trio of online reading groups led by Professor Kirsti Bohata, Kandace Siobhan Walker and Esyllt Lewis, as a portal into our Culture is Ordinary programme, marking the centenary of cultural theorist, socialist and educator Raymond Williams born in the village of Pandy in the Black Mountains in 1921. Together, we explored collective strategies for cultivating ‘response-ability’* for our future, drawing on Williams’ writings and a host of writers, activists and poets selected by the reading group hosts. Look out for Peak’s new Reading Room on Platform 2, Abergavenny Train Station open from mid October 2021 where you’ll be able to experience responses developed by the hosts of the reading groups.
* Author Donna Haraway defines 'response-ability' as 'cultivating collective knowing and doing.'
Between Country and City
Wednesday 12th May, 5.30–7pm
Kirsti Bohata, Professor of English, co-Director of CREW, the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales.
Drawing on the ways in which Raymond Williams’ writing speaks to the challenges of addressing contemporary concerns and crises, Kirsti Bohata hosted a reading group to explore 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.
Dreaming as praxis
Wednesday 19th May, 5:30pm–7pm
Kandace Siobhan Walker, writer and filmmaker from the Brecon Beacons and other places.
Inspired by Raymond Williams’ idea of ‘a sharing socialism’, writer and filmmaker Kandace Siobhan Walker hosted a reading group to investigate the necessity of collectivity, imagination and dreams in radical struggle and change.
Mae'r coed yn pydru \ Just Keep Scrolling
Wednesday 26th May, 5:30pm–7pm
Esyllt Angharad Lewis, artist, translator and co-editor of mwnwgl and Y Stamp.
Drawing on her recent performance lecture with Pegwn - the group of artists, writers and thinkers who have come together around Welsh language futures - artist, translator and editor Esyllt Lewis hosted a reading group which explores both the tension, and potential, between layers of language in translation.
About this image:
Musician and artist Emma Daman Thomas is creating a series of images and artworks to guide us through the Culture is Ordinary programme, beginning with Rebuild. Emma looked to the geologic time of local standing stones in Radnorshire, locating these standing stones as trigger points and a form of ‘earth acupuncture’ – becoming a site of release, softening and stretching out. In standing for thousands of years, these stones can be viewed as immutable, but they too will continue to, change, nested in relation to the earth’s 4.6-billion-year history.