Commenced in February 2022 and concluded in January 2023, African Leipzig is a project between The Centre for the Less Good Idea and David Krut Projects, and the LIA-Leipzig International Art Programme.
Ten multidisciplinary artists – nine from South Africa and one from Ethiopia – embarked on residencies at The Spinnerei in Leipzig to enhance knowledge in digital and analogue art making processes. The residencies included a workshop with the Vlado & Maria Ondrej Studio for Contemporary Etching at The Spinnerei, providing each artist the opportunity to create a limited editioned print during their three-month residencies.
African Leipzig is primarily a residency about developing new ways of working and collaborating across continents and cultures. Artists were encouraged to bring their own disciplines and ways of working to the process, with a particular focus on ways of working within the digital realm – video, performance, media art, and sound art.
Each artist spent three months in studios within this large, regenerated factory, which was the largest cotton spinning mill in Europe up until the end of the Cold War. It now provides studios for more than one hundred artists, as well as many commercial art galleries and more. This site developed out of and continues to be implicated in the history of colonisation and extraction in Africa by Germany. This was not an overt provocation throughout the residencies, but rather served as a possible point of entry into the myriad explorations and collaborations.
Interdisciplinary collaboration, play, and a hybrid analogue and digital approach to the etching process were some of the ways of working that emerged through the residency processes. Artists also spent time exploring and engaging with the museums and galleries in the area, immersing themselves in the daily life of Leipzig and its surroundings. One in particular, The Museum für Druckkunst Leipzig, is a unique institution which documents the earliest of printing methods for books, engraving and etching presses, and being both a museum and a printing workshop, it is particularly used by artists.
The residency programme culminated in the African Leipzig group exhibition, hosted at Arts on Main in Downtown Johannesburg, and featuring 20 etchings made by artists from Africa and Germany. African Leipzig was on exhibition from 15 April to 31 May 2023.
The etchings exhibited in African Leipzig bear the markings, gestures and reflections of the 20 artists who took part in the residency programme. In this way, each artwork functions as a record of engagement – a collaborative and free-spirited experimentation with the generative process of printmaking.
Participating artists were: Katherine Bull, Freshwoyen Endrias, Roxy Kaczmarek, Hemali Khoosal, Bongile Lecoge-Zulu, Motlhoki Nono, Natalie Paneng, Oupa Sibeko, Tzung-Hui Lauren Lee, Xhanti Zwelendaba, Sebastian Burger, Silke Koch, Bjørn Melhus, Maria Ondrej, Vlado Ondrej, Ramona Schacht, Jana Schulz, Maria Schumacher, Raul Walch & Angelika Waniek.
This project was made possible with the kind support of the German Federal Foreign Office.
In November, off the back of a successful 9th Season in South Africa, The Centre for the Less Good Idea travelled to Milwaukee, USA to present three original works developed at The Centre.
Upon invitation by Milwaukee’s Warehouse Art Museum (WAM), which was also host to See for Yourself, a solo exhibition of William Kentridge’s work, The Centre staged three one-act plays – An Outpost of Progress, Mayakovsky, and A Hunger Artist – at the Broadway Theatre Center.
While Outpost of Progress and Mayakovsky were performed inside a custom-built Pepper’s Ghost inside of a black box theatre, A Hunger Artist was performed front of stage. All three pieces carried the related narrative threads of literature, postcoloniality, and the embodiment of text.
Importantly, this was the first time that the Pepper’s Ghost was performed internationally, and proved the mobility of the Pepper’s Ghost as a theatrical device, as well as a methodology for making original work that resonates very strongly outside of The Centre. As a result, the Centre’s Pepper’s Ghost works have continued to travel and tour internationally.
The Centre is hugely grateful to WAM co-founders Jan Serr and John Shannon for the invitation to share our artistic processes and ways of working with new audiences.
In conjunction with the exhibition William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows, The Broad and REDCAT co-presented the first global performance of Houseboy, developed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea and first performed as part of its 7th Season in 2021.
Based on the 1956 novel by Cameroonian diplomat Ferdinand Oyono, the performance is directed by William Kentridge and explores themes of historical participation, archival memory, and post-colonial identity. Upending accounts of colonial history told by colonisers, Houseboy looks at the same period through the vantage-point of the colonised, specifically through the eyes of Toundi Ondoua who is forced to serve a colonial household.
The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s staged interpretation of Oyono's novel creates an immersive multimedia experience that muses on agency, memory and trauma.
PHOTOGRAPHER | Zivanai Matangi
“Six inspiring short performances blend dance and live music, developed by South African artists at William Kentridge’s leading centre for experimental, collaborative and cross-disciplinary arts.”
From 6 to 9 October 2022 The Centre for the Less Good Idea presented To What End at The Barbican. This curated programme featured diverse performances from a range of disciplines including a captivating all-female chorus, as well as rhythmic dance and a physical theatre solo. The innovative performances used text, sound, music, movement and visuals in experimental ways to explore themes of social and political change in South Africa.
To What End performance programme:
Footnotes, sees a team of dancers and musicians equipped with typewriters and percussive instruments questioning the nature of their being and their labour. Caught between modes of survival and instruction, this is a rampantly physical dance and sound piece.
The Weep of the Whips is a breathtaking physical two-hander seeking to find power in brokenness in which the sjambok (whip) is used as a tool for instruction and musicality.
Commission Continua is a personal and heartfelt one-hander, in which paper becomes a shrewd and incisive metaphor.
A musical performance sees the use of instruments and bodies to both replicate and pay tribute to the myriad sounds and narratives of South Africa’s northernmost province in Sounds of Limpopo.
The largest ensemble work of the programme, Pitsana is a performance that grapples with the conventions of responsibility, duty, and labour. It is a story that posits the consequences of a physical and psychological repression of energy.
An ensemble female chorus come together in the performance of Umthandazo, taking its lead from the oft-overlooked victims of the 2012 Marikana Massacre.
On 1 October 2022, as part of William Kentridge’s major single artist exhibition at The Royal Academy’s Main Galleries, Kafka’s Ape was performed at the Royal Academy's Benjamin West Lecture Theatre.
Kafka’s Ape is an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s short story A Report to an Academy. It takes a metaphorical view of South African society through the representation of an ‘evolving’ primate who is made to present a report on his attempts to mimic human nature.
Directed by Phala Ookeditse Phala and performed by Tony Bonani Miyambo, Kafka’s Ape is a rich adaptation of a profound and wide-ranging text combined with a powerful physical performance. Miyambo embodies the character of the ape and the anguish and oppression that he labours under.
While Kafka’s original story tests the notions of identity, assimilation, and survival, Phala and Miyambo’s adaptation ultimately reckons with the unending complexities of identity in the contemporary world. It is a performance that continuously returns to the key themes of otherness, inhumanity, alienation, dissociation, and the unbearable reality of not being at home in one’s own body.
Since its inception over a decade ago, Kafka’s Ape has travelled to countries across the globe and has been performed alongside a plethora of critical moments in recent history. The realities of xenophobia, racism, animal cruelty, genocide, and more have all been absorbed and grappled with by the play throughout its years of touring.
Kafka’s Ape was developed in association with the Centre for the Less Good Idea.
Supported by Wendy Fisher and the A4 Arts Foundation.
