William Kentridge

Over this last five weeks,  a number of projects I have done are related to this larger project of thinking about the studio and some of them have also connected to a much smaller ideas.  Many of you know that I started about four years ago the Center of the Less Good Idea which is located in downtown Johannesburg where different artists actors performers musicians and videographers writers come together and make some programs of collaboration that we show to the public.  And there have been some remarkable projects out of this process.  And our seventh season,  of which I was one of the curators,  were scheduled to happen last week which because of the lockdown that was impossible.   

But continuing during the lockdown we invited people to make 1 minute  films,  usually on their cellphones,  and send them in for the IG off the center of the less good idea.  So one of things I’ve been doing is making a series of 1 minute films.  And all of them are testing ideas for how does one show what happens in the studio.  How do you take a theme or idea and find a material in which to think about that…. in this episodic series there is the question of how do work with a film medium in which the medium itself can show the process of thinking.  It’s not a documentary and it’s not a lecture.

Is this simply procrastination or is it a productive procrastination?

It may be a possible way of holding different kinds of thoughts about the studio.  Is it simply a physical space or is the studio a kind of an enlargement of the head? So where you have all the different thoughts that travel from the cerebellum to hippocampus to the amygdala,  to all the different processing parts and that is an equivalent to the drawings on the walls of the studio to the images and the headlines and the different news  that you’ve read about COVID-19 that come into the studio.