Over the course of Season 7, The Centre for the Less Good Idea showcased a daily installation of film works produced using Pepper’s Ghost technology. Physicality, identity, creation and interpretation are a few of the themes explored across this programme, all inspired by the nature of text and language.

METAMORPHOSIS

Through the use of mirrored and manipulated footage, and responsive vocal components, Metamorphosis explores the themes of physicality, interpretation, and animality.

A video work borne out of the melting of wax pelvises originally created in the process of making bronzes, Metamorphosis mirrors the image in motion, resulting in a series of transitioning, Rorschach-like visuals and motifs.

A further component of the work comes in the form of music created through whispers and responsive sound generated by conceptualiser of the work, Bronwyn Lace, and vocalist Bongile Lecoge-Zulu. Sound, visuals, and the viewer’s own interpretation of what they are hearing and bearing witness to are all vital components to the work.

What remains? The mesmeric melting, vanishing, reanimating of the pelvis in perpetuity. It is an ever-changing and ever-present scene that is at times eerie and violent, other times clawing and morose, but always compelling.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

LIBRARY OF BABEL

Taking the story by Jorge Luis Borges as a thought experiment, this installation explores the nature of The Algorithm as creator: A collection of surreal texts, completely written by AI, plays out as a contemporary realisation of the Library of Babel.

Set against the darkened, half-silvered canvas of the Pepper’s Ghost, a series of animations, abstractions, and visual motifs leads the viewer further into the machine, as words and narratives begin to play out before us. Books pile up and fall, the pathways of thought and language widen and intertwine.

As one watches text being fed through the machine and re-authored by the algorithm, the resulting performance is a fragmented narrative that oscillates between dystopic speculation, blunt laconicism, and the machine's own cerebral ramblings, all stemming from the historical corpus of human writings.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

CONCEPTUALISER, EDITOR & COMPOSITOR | Janus Fouché
CONCEPT & RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS | Jane Taylor
CINEMATOGRAPHER | Duško Marović SASC

WITNESSES

Witnesses is a video-based installation which harnesses projection, materiality, and physicality in order to explore how figures perform across time and space, and how we as viewers go about engaging with that performance.

Harnessing the ghost-like, carnivalesque qualities of the Pepper’s Ghost, Witnesses is both an experiment in ways of occupying and engaging with space, and a free-spirited encounter with the incidental and surplus experimentations that take place at The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

CONCEPTUALISER | William Kentridge
CINEMATOGRAPHER | Duško Marović SASC
EDITOR & COMPOSITOR | Janus Fouché

BEYOND THE PALE

Beyond the Pale is a video installation merging original sound and visual work through the myriad dimensions of the Pepper’s Ghost.

What can be seen as a meditation drawing on Homi K Bhabha’s Art of Multicultural Translation, the video installation features a series of glass receptacles, each housing a slow, mercurial cloud of colours. Coupled with original, responsive chorus work, Beyond the Pale presents a mesmeric show of sound, form and colour.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

CONCEPTUALISERS | Žana Marović & Duško Marović SASC
COMPOSER | Phala Ookeditse Phala
PERFORMERS | Phala Ookeditse Phala, Micca Manganye & Muzi Shili
EDITOR & COMPOSITOR | Žana Marović

Over the course of Season 7, The Centre for the Less Good Idea showcased a multimedia exhibition and installation by Bronwyn Lace titled Still Life.

STILL LIFE

Bronwyn Lace has long been a collector of things. From dead insects and animal bones, to broken glass and obsolete encyclopaedias, she keeps these objects with her until the right time to process them presents itself.

In Still Life we see Lace’s collection of bones cleaned, gilded, threaded, dutifully photographed and digitally blended into one another on a four-screen video installation. Lace’s instinct as an artist has been to use and transform the darker elements of life – death and decay, abandonment and neglect – as ingredients to foster in-between spaces or platforms portraying the significance of fragility and vulnerability.

Accompanying the video installation is a suspended and re-assembled ostrich ribcage and pelvis. This floats and turns above a refracting mirror onto which a cluster of folded pages of Encyclopedia Britannica is set. Each carefully crafted miniature invokes a sense of patience and alludes to the process of transitioning into a meditative state.

Collaboration is central to Still Life. The silent video works and installation elements find themselves in conversation with landscape music composer Anne Vanschothorst’s spoken word project klip lied snaar: voordrag van gedigte en harpmusiek, a collaborative compositional project made in response to the poetry and voice of Antjie Krog. The selected poems by Krog are ‘Still Life’, ‘Land van Genade en Verdriet’, ‘Die Ligaam Beroof’, and ‘Grond’.

Altogether, these elements make for an immersive and multifaceted installation. Relationships both incidental and intentional emerge between the various materials and artworks. There are the strings in the music of Vanschothorst and their dialogue with the threaded bones, Krog’s spoken word and its relationship to the brittle, bristling paper. The shadows, too, are in constant conversation with the darkness of the mirrors and the shimmer of the gilded canvas.

As a stand-alone installation, Still Life is a deeply affecting body of work. Read in conjunction with the performances of Season 7 of The Centre for the Less Good Idea, the installation also becomes a place of great respite and reflection – a space to ponder and process those ephemeral notions of history, language, death and memory.

– Bronwyn Lace & David Mann

CREDITS: