Since its inception The Centre for the Less Good Idea has hosted In Conversation events, often leveraging off existing opportunities and identifying remarkable individuals who happen to be moving through Johannesburg. The Centre invites these individuals to join us in spontaneous conversations with its founder, William Kentridge. Previous In Conversation events have included Homi K Bhabha, Paul Gilroy, Yinka Shonibare, Jane Taylor, Walid Raad and Ernesto Neto.

CREDITS:

PRODUCTION FOR THE CENTRE (2022)
ANIMATEUR | Phala O. Phala
DIRECTOR | Bronwyn Lace
MOMENTEUR FOR THE SO ACADEMY | Athena Mazarakis
DIRECTOR OF CINEMATOGRAPHY & EDITOR | Noah Cohen
SOUND DESIGNER & ENGINEER | Zain Vally
ADMINISTRATOR & STAGE MANAGER | Dimakatso Motholo
SPACE MANAGER AND COSTUMES & PROPS ASSISTANT | Gracious Dube
PUBLIC COMMUNICATIONS LIAISON | Hayleigh Evans
PHOTOGRAPHER | Zivanai Matangi
LIVESTREAM ENGINEER | Chris-Waldo de Wet
JUNIOR CINEMATOGRAPHER | Bukhosibakhe Kelvin Khoza
LIGHTING DESIGNER | Wesley France
LIGHTING ENGINEER | Matthews Phala
LIGHTING ASSISTANT | Bongani Mpofu
LIGHTING EQUIPMENT | Gearhouse Split Beam (Pty) Ltd
SOUND ENGINEERING | Soulfire Studios
FRONT OF HOUSE | POPArt Productions
PROCESS WRITER | David Mann
WEBSITE & UPLOADS MANAGER | Niamh Walsh-Vorster

Special thanks:
Linda Leibowitz
Natalie Dembo
Anne McIlleron
Anne Blom
Taryn Buccellato
Joy Woolcott
Chris-Waldo de Wet
Jacques van Staden
Joey Netshiombo
Diego Sillands
Thandi Mzizi Nkabinde

IN CONVERSATION | SIOPIS, BONGELA-DAVIS & MUYANGA 

On Saturday 28 September, The Centre for the Less Good Idea hosted an In Conversation between artist and filmmaker Penny Siopis and writer, editor, cultural worker and artist Milisuthando Bongela-Davis. 

For this In Conversation, while Siopis is physically present at The Centre in Maboneng, Johannesburg, Bongela-Davis joins via live-stream from Harlem, New York. Moderated by The Centre’s Impresario, Neo Muyanga, the conversation looks at, among other things, the links between autobiographical and archival material in order to tell personal and universal stories, and taking an embodied, conversational and collaborative approach to film. 

Material archives

What does it mean to look at the history of a people through photographs and moving images? Both Siopis and Bongela-Davis make use of archival footage in their films. For Siopis this is largely found footage, sourced from flea-markets and yard-sales, there is also her own family archive. Similarly, Bongela-Davis draws on both found footage of family and personal archives, and footage filmed herself. 

Both filmmakers, however, work with the genre of the home movie. In this way, the material itself is evidence of a particular way of seeing. In South Africa, this becomes a way of seeing along racial and cultural lines, too. 

For Siopis, navigating found footage is an exercise in grappling with a particular domesticity and intimacy, populated by imagery and activity that is at once foreign and familiar to her. For Bongela-Davis, the archive became a way of speaking to a collective ancestor through the faces and presences of the people represented in the footage. Both filmmakers speak to the notion that, holding found and archival footage in a contemporary way, allows for a certain cleansing, a refiguring, or a recalibrating of this footage. 

Rethinking Southern African cinema, and filmmaking like jazz

South Africa has a long history of producing films. Much of this has either been extractive, or follows the form and function of Western filmic traditions. Rather than labelling contemporary filmmaking in South Africa as “South African cinema,” explains Bongela-Davis, why not focus on the development of “Nguni cinema”? Engaging filmmaking as a tool that is political in the world, and with a specific set of politics and histories in South Africa, allows for a necessary rethinking of the methodologies and functionality of filmmaking, she explains. 

Both Siopis and Bongela-Davis share a style of composing and editing their films that follows a free-form, intuitive and jazz-like methodology. For both, there is a visual rhythm at work, and a collage-like process of working with footage that allows them to find the overall composition. 

Similarly, Bongela-Davis references American editor Walter Murch when explaining that editing is somewhat dreamlike in nature – a dream being described and interpreted, and subsequently reinterpreted as it’s made. For Siopis, the act of painting and of engaging with the canvas, is something that takes place in the dreamscape. Editing her films, she explains, is much the same – intuitive, improvisational, and exploratory.    

A Q&A session following the Conversation further reveals each filmmaker’s ways of thinking, working, and making decisions around narrative, storytelling and editing.   

CREDITS:  

DISCUSSANTS | Penny Siopis & Milisuthando Bongela-Davis 
MODERATOR | Neo Muyanga
MOMENTEUR FOR THE SO ACADEMY | Athena Mazarakis 

– David Mann

On Friday 31 May, SO | The Academy for the Less Good Idea hosted and In Conversation between writer, editor, researcher and head of Creative Writing at Wits University, Stacy Hardy, and Chicago-based poet and translator Daniel Borzutzky, featuring Chicago-based poet, artist, and editor Fred Schmalz and moderated by Impresario for the Less Good Idea, Neo Muyanga.

Using Hardy and Borzutzky’s new publication The Breathers as a point of departure, the four discussed breath as a form of resistance, asphyxiation in Africa and the Americas, and writing as a collaborative act.

The Breathers

The Breathers is a collaborative long poem written by Borzutzky and Hardy. The project is an attempt to experiment with ways to document both the suppression of breath caused by capitalism, and the liberation of breath, or, the mere act of breathing as a form of political resistance to those forces that confront our bodies with what cannot be said, what cannot be seen, and what cannot be done.

Part opera, part angry rant, part lullaby, part dream song, part soliloquy, The Breathers channels what the politics of breath looks like across languages and borders, and through Africa and the Americas.

Collaborative writing and multiple points of departure

What one word must never be said?
Dead, and these men fight off our dying,
Cough in the theatres of war.

– Muriel Rukeyser

Hardy and Borzutzky cite The Book of the Dead, Muriel Rukeyser’s long narrative poem as an essential point of departure for their own long poem, The Breathers. The book itself is dedicated to Rukeyser and features extracts from her prose.

Opening the In Conversation, and situated throughout it, are moments of collaborative reading. Here, Hardy, Borzutzky and Schmalz read from The Breathers – the structure of which lends itself to a conversational, call-and-response kind of reading – while Muyanga compliments the prose with an improvisational musical performance. A series of drawings and illustrations from the book are projected onto the wall behind them.

Hardy and Borzutzky explain that psychoanalyst and social philosopher Frantz Fanon’s notion of breath as resistance was another essential source of inspiration for the text. Over time, their collaborative writing practice grew into a series of cross-continental musings on machines, repair, bodies, breath, labour and death amongst other things.

The idea of holes became another generative metaphor throughout the book, as did the notions of writing for the dead, and economies of disease and dis-ease. Writing via email to one another over an extended period of time, explain the authors, also lead to a certain cross-pollination – a process of “infecting one another’s practice.”

Similarly, Muyanga and Hardy reflected briefly on their own history of collaboration through the cultural production platform Chimurenga, and how a long-term process of thinking and working alongside one another can influence creative practices.

At the end of the discussion, questions from the audience prompted further reflections from Hardy and Borzutzky in relation to the act of writing.

CREDITS

MODERATOR | Neo Muyanga
DISCUSSANTS | Stacy Hardy, Daniel Borzutzky & Fred Schmalz

IN CONVERSATION | SOYINKA, KENTRIDGE & MUYANGA

Central to the Collations | On Air: Visual Radio Plays programme is an In Conversation between Wole Soyinka and founder of The Centre, William Kentridge, moderated by Neo Muyanga. Sonyinka’s focus on Pan-Africanism in his practice, as well as the idea of African Tragedy in his work, are among the points of conversation. They also discuss a forthcoming publication by Soyinka, which features artworks by Kentridge.

CREDITS:

MODERATOR | Neo Muyanga
DISCUSSANTS | Wole Soyinka & William Kentridge

On Saturday 4 February, SO | The Academy for the Less Good Idea hosted American film editor, director, writer and sound designer, Walter Murch In Conversation with founder of The Centre, William Kentridge.

Murch is best-known for his work as a film editor and sound designer for modern cinema. An Academy Award-winner, he has worked on films including Apocalypse Now, The Godfather: Part II, American Graffiti and The English Patient. More recently, he has worked as consulting editor on Kentridge’s Self Portrait as a Coffee Pot (2022), a nine-part film series chronicling the artist’s studio process.

Over the course of the conversation, which took place in Kentridge’s Maboneng studio, the two discussed how they began working together, the history of editing film, the role technology has played in the editing process, the effects of the Golden Ratio in cinema, and Murch’s personal process on films like Apocalypse Now.

Certain synchronicities between Kentridge and Murch emerged throughout the conversation. Both embrace the processes and habits that develop in the studio, for example. For Kentridge, the ambulant processes of thinking out loud and of pacing in the studio are central, while Murch will only edit while standing, and write while lying down, frequently engaging in “menial tasks and chores” to break up the editing process. Similarly, the act of negotiating with the internal voices of artist and critic, or writer and editor, are central considerations in their respective practices.

While anchored in specific themes, the conversation also organically gave way to anecdotes and asides on editing as a form of poetry, cinema influencing the dreamscape (and vice versa), and the impact of the COVID-19 lockdowns on one’s ways of working.

An audience Q&A following the In Conversation prompted Murch to share further insights around the changing nature of film and editing over the decades, his experience of film school, and the rise of formulaic editing through television and streaming platforms.

— David Mann

An In Conversation with founder of The Centre William Kentridge, artist and academic Jane Taylor, Kafka’s Ape director Phala Ookeditse Phala, and its performer Tony Bonani Miyambo.

Over the course of the conversation the four reflect on working with Kafka’s texts, the life and work of the writer, the modalities of otherness and alienation on stage, and the changing nature of Kafka’s Ape­ – from its inception as a Master of Arts performance to its subsequent staging in venues across the globe.

For Phala, who was born in Botswana and lives and works in South Africa, the impetus for the adaptation of Kafka’s short story involved “making sense of otherness”, a point that has a profound rootedness in the text. The ability of the play to act as a membrane for current affairs is also discussed, in particular it’s changing points of reference and relation to the contemporary world.

Performing the play alongside moments of global upheaval, discrimination, mourning, and more has provided Miyambo with the ability to make sense of the world by “observing and purging” through his character, and using the play as a changing space for interrogation of these moments. Finally, the duality of human and animal nature is discussed, as is the recurring reality that’s present in Kafka’s stories: that of feeling painfully foreign within, and alienated from, one’s most private and intimate space – the body.

A Kafka Moment is a mini-season of select works that were created or performed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea, and prompted by the writings of Franz Kafka.

Taking place at The Centre in April 2021 and leveraged off of an invitation of Kafka's Ape by the University of Toronto, Canada and the University of Western Cape, the mini-season was spread across two evenings, each featuring a unique programme of performances, staged for a limited live audience and live-streamed for free on The Centre’s YouTube channel. Performers included Ameera Patel, Clare Loveday, Bongile Gorata Lecoge-Zulu, Jane Taylor, Antony Coleman, Sue Pam-Grant, Kevin Smith, Michael Mazibuko, Dan Selsick and Tony Bonani Miyambo.

Using the comical, grotesque, existential and frighteningly prophetic writings of Kafka as a springboard, the performances that make up A Kafka Moment are at once experimental and macabre, playful and surreal. At the core of each programme is an attempt at puzzling out the nature of the short-form on stage – the activity of reading aloud, the embodiment of the short story in the performer, or the testing of new ideas through hybrid analogue and digital forms.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

STAGE MANAGERS | Dimakatso Motholo & Nthabiseng Malaka

In late November of 2020, as part of the SO Academy’s Sonic Composition and Design mentorship programme, The Centre for the Less Good Idea hosted an In Conversation event between founder of The Centre, William Kentridge, and bassist, composer and music producer, Shane Cooper.

Opening the evening is a brief introduction by Kentridge which takes the shape of an impromptu tape recording, with Cooper improvising on upright bass. The resultant conversation takes place while Cooper manually cuts and splices fragments of sound and performance before running a completed length of manipulated tape through a Nagra tape machine – one of the key devices he employed while leading the mentorship programme with the SO Academy.

Through this brief bit of experimentation with live performance and analogue technology, Cooper and Kentridge extract sound from the immediate environment, rearrange it on tape, and re-introduce it to the stage. Audiences witness the materiality and the performativity of sound as the doctored tape moves across the stage and through the tape machine, relaying its incidental composition.

Over the course of the conversation, the two artists reflect on the journey of collaborative, episodic composition and design that led to Happenstance, the multi-layered series of soundbooks that came out of the SO Academy. Kentridge and Cooper also discuss their respective modes of engagement with the fringes and margins of the sonic world in their works – evoking sensory atmosphere through rhythm, intensity, vibrations, pulsations, resonance and discordance.

Musings on the physicality of sound as material for thought and imagination, the process of embracing aleatoric sound in order to break out of certain habits and routines in the creative process and the incidental and generative method of composition that arises from the playful engagement with analogue technologies, are other points of discussion throughout the evening.

Closing off the In Conversation is a brief Q&A session which leads to discussions around the notion of fragmented sound, music as collage and the essence and origins of sonic performance.

– David Mann

Ahead of the 2020 performance of Waiting for Godot at The Centre for the Less Good Idea, two In Conversation events were initiated as part of The Centre’s SO Academy in order to further explore the complexities of thinking and feeling that constitute the world of Samuel Beckett’s significant play in a contemporary South African context.

This second In Conversation, titled “Searching for Godot, Researching Beckett” takes place at The Centre on the evening of 29 October 2020 and sees writer, artist and academic Jane Taylor, who serves as dramaturg for the work, in conversation with animateur for The Centre, and director of the play, Phala Ookeditse Phala.

While the first In Conversation explored the embodiment of the characters in the play, this discussion sees Taylor and Phala working through the text itself, drawing out and pursuing various intertextual skeins of thought from Beckett’s own political history in order to further locate the play in a contemporary global and South African context. Over the course of an evening, the two engage in searching Beckett’s “fearless inventory of exploring and being the ‘other’ in making the story, and revealing the complexities of thinking and feeling that constitute the world of the play.”

Performative fragments from the cast (Tony Miyambo as Estragon/Gogo, Billy Langa as Vladimir/Didi, Jemma Kahn as Lucky and Boy, and Stefania Du Toit as Pozzo) also provide a brief bit of insight into the way that these themes and complexities take shape in the text. The mutual bondages that characterise the relationships between these characters are unpacked and contextualised in relation to the central questions and explorations in Beckett’s work, as is his research into imperial oppression, the post-war condition, and the asymmetries inside power and gender.

Beckett’s interests in, and considerations of, Africa and South Africa are touched on, helping to further locate the work of the playwright, and make sense of the staging of Waiting for Godot on the African continent, further demonstrating how the text finds a South African locality. Finally, a discussion on the motivations and functions of absurdism in the text explores meditations on fallibility, and the political unconsciousness in Beckett’s characters.

– David Mann

Ahead of the 2020 performance of Waiting for Godot at The Centre for the Less Good Idea, two ‘In Conversation’ events were initiated as part of The Centre’s SO Academy in order to further explore the complexities of thinking and feeling that constitute the world of Samuel Beckett’s significant play in a contemporary South African context.

This first In Conversation, titled “In Rehearsal with Godot” takes place at The Centre on the evening of 23 October 2020 and sees writer, artist and academic Jane Taylor, who serves as dramaturg for the work, in conversation with The Centre’s animateur and director of the play, Phala Ookeditse Phala as well as the cast which features the renowned talents of Tony Bonani Miyambo as Estragon (Gogo), Billy Edward Langa as Vladimir (Didi), Jemma Kahn as Lucky and Boy, and Stefania Du Toit as Pozzo.

Using the world between the words as a starting point, Taylor and Phala unpack the initial need to make sense of the space in which the play would be produced, and how set became a vital starting point. How the incidental nature of an immovable wooden beam serving as structural support in The Centre space provided the answer, ultimately becoming one of the first characters in this iteration of the play – the tree.

A showing by the cast provides an opportunity for audiences to observe the embodiment of the characters, if only briefly, and acts as a springboard for rich discussion around the pre-history of the play, the physical and psychological act of waiting in contemporary times, and the ingraining of habit, text, and character in the body. The cast reflects on the circumstantial luxury of being able to sit with a text for an extended period, picking the script apart through countless zoom rehearsals and having time to imagine how their characters would exist in the world, before being able to physically meet and begin work on the play.

Ending the conversation is an extended discussion on the challenges and joys of exploring the central question, circumstance or phrase of “nothing to be done” as well as how notions of language, play, identity, and intimacy became vital tools in a journey of embodiment that begins with freedom.

– David Mann

In November 2018, as part of the In Conversation programme, The Centre for the Less Good Idea hosted a conversation between its founder William Kentridge, and Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto.

A mutual love for the sculptor Alexander Calder – whose rotating sculptures inspired Kentridge’s Waiting for the Sibyl project – opens the evening and leads to playful discussions on balance, form, movement, mark-making, the body and more.

The resultant informal and free-spirited discussion between the two artists can be seen as taking a form similar to that of Neto’s own sprawling sculptural work. Conversation stretches, takes off in different directions, grows abundant and drops down from time to time into rich, concentrated pockets.

Over the course of the conversation, Kentridge and Neto muse over a vast array of topics ranging from sport and politics by way of the 2014 Fifa World Cup in Brazil, to museum fires and land debates that spark further discussion on the relationship between knowledge, history and periphery thought in art-making and ways of seeing the world.

Ultimately, the hour-long event is as much a dedicated discussion on certain prompts and points of conversation as it is a spontaneous and spirited pursuit of seemingly disparate thoughts and gestures towards rich and productive ends.

– Hemali Khoosal & David Mann

CREDITS:

PROJECT MANAGER | Shruthi Nair
STAGE MANAGER | Hayleigh Evans & POPArt Productions

In October 2018, following a lecture-performance by Walid Raad that opened The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s 4th Season, The Centre hosted an In Conversation event between Raad and founder of The Centre, William Kentridge.

Season 4, curated by writer and academic Jane Taylor, carried the central prompt of ‘The Collapsed Conference’ and explored, among other things, what happens to an academic argument once it’s channelled through, or constrained by, the medium of performance.

In this vein, Kentridge and Raad discuss the use of archival information, found media, and Raad’s own creations to deliberate on the idea of history as a construction, and the archive as a collection of disjointed truths and realities, skewed by time, language and medium.

Similarly, the form and the expectation of the academic presentation or the artist talk is discussed, as is the allowance of art and the ability of artists to take raw information and material and play with them, dipping into the archive and altering what is found there towards certain ends.

The precarity of words and language forms another part of the discussion, as does the ability of fiction to lead one to the inherent absurdity of truth. A productive Q&A session in response to both the conversation and Raad’s preceding performance ends the evening.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

PROJECT MANAGER | Shruthi Nair
LIGHTING DESIGNERS | Wesley France & Guy Nelson
STAGE MANAGER | Hayleigh Evans & POPArt Productions

In September 2018 The Centre for the Less Good Idea, in association with the Goodman Gallery and the FNB Joburg Art Fair, played host to a conversation between Yinka Shonibare MBE and William Kentridge as part of its In Conversation programme.

Over the course of their 50-minute conversation, the two artists discuss everything from death, theatricality and collaboration, to the last supper and the opera. There is a remarkable resonance in the work of both Shonibare and Kentridge, with both artists being interested in similar images and ways of making art, although very often through disparate impulses or avenues of thought. Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing, the notion of the black ballerina and the work of William Hogarth are a few examples of sources of inspiration and inquiry for both artists.

The idea of the opera as a medium that allows for emotion and for the poetic to be dealt with head-on is another point of conversation, as is the studio as a space of physical and emotional comfort that functions as a safe space for play, experimentation and failure. Similarly, a practice and studio environment that both embraces and encourages collaboration and the extension of itself into an alternative and accessible space for the arts is something that both artists work towards in their respective cities.

While Kentridge may be a South African artist and Shonibare a London-based artist of African origin, the two discover a remarkable degree of overlapping and intersecting interests and methodologies. One possible reason for this, they explain, could be a similarity of temperament – embracing hybridity rather than working towards purity or essentialism in one’s work.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

CINEMATOGRAPHER | Kutlwano Makgalemele
PROJECT MANAGER | Shruthi Nair
LIGHTING DESIGNERS | Wesley France & Guy Nelson
STAGE MANAGER | Hayleigh Evans & POPArt Productions

In March 2018, as part of the In Conversation programme, The Centre for the Less Good Idea hosted a conversation between Sam Nhlengethwa and William Kentridge, moderated by Goodman Gallery’s Neil Dundas.

Over the course of the conversation, Nhlengethwa and Kentridge discuss their love for music, their early memories of growing up in South Africa and the significant moments and sources of inspiration in their early careers. Running throughout and alongside the conversation is a vital thread that ties together the key points of the 1976 Soweto Uprising, the Johannesburg Art Foundation (JAF) and The Market Theatre, and how all of this has impacted the lives and careers of both artists.

Nhlengethwa and Kentridge were born in the same year, and into the same era of South African political history. Central to their mutual history is the story of the JAF, founded by Bill Ainslie in the 1980s as a space that prized the kind of practical and widely accessible arts education that was crucially lacking in South Africa at the time. It was at the JAF that the two artists would work on their respective crafts and establish connections to galleries and collectors alike.

The two artists also discuss how their individual journeys to the JAF may have been remarkably different, but their subsequent careers followed similar trajectories, with both artists hosting their debut exhibitions at The Market Theatre, exhibiting internationally through anti-apartheid shows, going on to work with the Goodman Gallery and ultimately expressing an urgent and vital desire to assist contemporary artists in Johannesburg in ways similar to the JAF.

Punctuating the conversation are brief moments of music that allow for each artist, as well as the audience, to pause and reflect on the relationship between the movements in music and movement in the studio.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

CINEMATOGRAPHER | Kutlwano Makgalemele
PROJECT MANAGER | Shruthi Nair
LIGHTING DESIGNERS | Wesley France & Guy Nelson
STAGE MANAGER | Hayleigh Evans & POPArt Productions

Hosted at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in February 2018, this event sees founder of The Centre William Kentridge in conversation with Professor of American and European Literature at King's College, London, Fellow of the British Academy, and leading cultural and social theorist Paul Gilroy. Forming part of The Centre’s In Conversation programme, the evening saw the two discussing the topic of Africans in War, and in particular, the development of Kentridge's The Head and the Load project. They are later joined by dancer and choreographer Gregory Maqoma.

Beginning with an outline of the impetus for The Head and the Load, and the history of millions of African porters and carriers who served the British, French and German forces of the First World War, Kentridge and Gilroy discuss the difficulty of being able to place Africa back into the centre of reflection on the world’s wars, and of the erasure of particular lines of history and narrative.

Musings between Gilroy and Kentridge range from the lingering pathology of the empire and the role of artists in leading our collective need for the interrogation of history and modernity, to the mechanical absurdities of early war. This later gives way to brief showings of The Head and the Load in its workshop phase.

The two are subsequently joined by renowned dancer and choreographer Gregory Maqoma, who is also a key performer in the piece, to discuss “the spasm of history”. Maqoma demonstrates an embodiment of the discourses in the work through a performance of the body that he explains as being both at odds with itself, and always responding to an experience of violence.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

PROJECT MANAGER | Shruthi Nair
STAGE MANAGER | Hayleigh Evans & POPArt Productions

In August 2017, The Centre for the Less Good Idea hosted its debut In Conversation, an informal evening of discussion in which Homi K. Bhabha and William Kentridge shared thoughts on collaborative processes, the act of walking and the notion of the burdened life.

In addition to being one of the most important figures in post-colonial studies, Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. In 2012, Bhabha invited Kentridge to present the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard. Bhabha has also written extensively on Kentridge’s work, specifically his works that deal with the politics of procession, such as More Sweetly Play the Dance and The Head and the Load, both of which are discussed in this In Conversation.

Ambulant thought, carrying one’s burdens and conditions through life, and the process of occupying city spaces through the act of walking are also points of discussion between the two. The consideration of scale in a work of art produces similarly rich discussions on the function and value of shadows and ultimately ties back to ideas of process, materiality, the act of walking in the studio and the studio space itself as a place of convergence that can afford one a utopian view of the outside world.

Ultimately, the 1hr 15 minute In Conversation is a rich and playful discussion that riffs on topics ranging from the processions of the dispossessed and the notion of foot power, to the nature of Johannesburg city and the artist’s mind in studio.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

PROJECT MANAGER | Shruthi Nair
STAGE MANAGER | Hayleigh Evans & POPArt Productions