Keywords Lecture: otolith

Curated by Grant Watson, Senior Curator and Research Fellow

This lecture series brings together a series of artists, curators, writers, critics and theorists to discuss and debate a number of keywords that shape our response to a contemporary culture of difference.

Keywords, takes its title from Raymond William’s Keywords: A vocabulary of Culture and Society in which William’s carefully unpicks some the most widely employed terms that we use to speak about our practices and institutions. These terms reflect changes in culture and society but critically they are also the site in which these changes are negotiated, as different individuals and groups adapt or contest their meaning. By tracing the genealogy of these words, Williams demonstrates the histories that they contain, their significant associates, their subtle inflections and their susceptibility to development and revision and how these changes reflect social attitudes.

Keyword – Otolith

Codona: Reorientation Points I – XVIII

The “otolith” can be understood as a sensorial micro-mechanism that participates in the continual production of the conditions of orientation, proprioception, stabilisation, direction, balance, verticality, ground, environment and world. The otolith therefore provides the broadest of contexts and the most oblique of entry points into The Otolith Group’s ongoing research.

One significant strand of the Group’s research consistently coalesces around the poetics and politics of Indophilia and Afrofuturology, each of which can be understood as vectors that articulate a proleptic dimension of the grand project of tricontinentalism. Drawing upon images and sounds for their forthcoming work on the musical practice of the avant garde trio Codona, The Otolith Group examines the aspirations, the promises and the threat deployed in avant-garde jazz movement’s enactment of ideas of the worldly, the folk, the universal and the organic.

Bookings

Book online here. For enquiries call 020 7749 1240 or email bookings@rivingtonplace.org

CONCESSIONS: For a concessionary rate (students, over 60s, unemployed) enter the code: Iniva_concession on eventbrite for a discounted rate.

NB. please print out your ticket (and present proof of concession) when you arrive at Rivington Place.