About the Project
Investigations in session during the Keywords Exhibition.
From April to June Iniva launched Keywords Investigations, a ten-week course using Raymond Williams’ book as the basis for a new enquiry into the meanings and histories of key cultural terms. Under the guidance of writer and educator Adrian Rifkin 16 participants explored the elasticity of meaning in relation to their chosen keywords.
The course began with an example of a possible outcome: a scene from Francois Truffaut’s film adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s classic dystopian sci-fi novel, Fahrenheit 451. showed people who had, through the memorisation of entire texts, become the embodiment of classic books that had been outlawed and burned. The idea was that over the duration of the course, participants could also come to embody their chosen words.
By the programme’s end, each of the participants had experimented with linking their keywords to an object of personal significance and to the artworks on display in Iniva’s Keywords exhibition. Their final activity was an exercise in experimental writing, with each participant creating a text that had, as its generative formula, the proviso to include all the other Keywords selected by the group.