The Centre for the Less Good Idea is an interdisciplinary incubator space for the arts based in Maboneng, Johannesburg

 HOW | SHOWING THE MAKING: NAOMI VAN NIEKERK

Naomi van Niekerk enters the stage, stands at her lightbox and lays out her tools – paintbrushes, porcupine quills, sand. She begins to draw, scooping up handfuls of the fine, black sand. Soon enough, an image emerges. Projected onto the wall behind her is an aerial view of her workspace, and subsequently, of the developing image. The audience, held by the process and the sonic refrain of Arnaud van Vliet, watches as a face emerges and an intricate portrait begins to take shape. She completes it, lets it hold for a moment, and wipes it away. 

On Friday 12 January 2024, The Centre for the Less Good Idea presented HOW | Showing the Making: Naomi van Niekerk. 

For this HOW, the South African visual artist, filmmaker and theatre director currently based in Lille, France, draws on her award-winning sand animation film, Box Cutters, as a central reference. 

Accompanied by the musician, composer and producer, Arnaud van Vliet, who has scored many of her films over the years, including Box Cutters, Van Niekerk provides insight into her technique of stop-motion animation. Using an image drawn with sand on a light table, as well as her latest method of scratching on 35mm film, she speaks to her process of working with poetic and narrative texts. 

Giving poetry a material form

The written word serves as a vital source of inspiration for Van Niekerk. One writer in particular, the South African poet Ronelda Kamfer, has been particularly inspirational in this regard. Kamfer’s poem “‘n Gewone blou Maandagoggend” was the basis for Van Niekerk’s short film by the same name, as was “Boxcutters” — a poem that details the walk home of a young woman who is attacked by a group of men. 

“My interest in Kamfer’s poetry was how short, vivid, and evocative it was,” explains Van Niekerk. “The imagery conjured in the poem ‘Boxcutters’, for example, directly inspires the construction of the visuals in the film.” 

Sand, and its rare ability to lend material form to poetic imagery – the ferocity of the barking dog, the slow extraction of the box cutter’s blade, the vigilance of the passing car – lends Van Niekerk a certain tactility that she says allows for “the presence of the artist” to be held in the material. Here, the artist demonstrates the various physical and digital techniques that go into the production of a stop-motion animation film made with sand. Using an altered paint brush, she scratches gently and deliberately at the edges of an image before photographing it for two frames, and repeating the process. “This is what we call the vibration of the image,” she explains. “The slightest touch helps to bring the image to life.” 

In addition to sand animation, van Niekerk also makes use of scratch animation, which entails a physical scratching into the layers of 35mm film. This technique of stop-motion animation, just as slight and deliberate as her process of working with sand, also allows for what Van Niekerk describes as “the physical representation of time. You can work with a length of film and you’ll know exactly how many frames, how many seconds it will amount to.” 

Crafting a soundscape

The soundscape for Box cutters is essential to both its narrative and emotional layering. Here, the collaboration with Arnaud van Vliet is essential. 

Beyond recording the ambient sound for the film and travelling to Makhanda in the Eastern Cape to record a reading by Kamfer, Van Vliet also composed original music. 

Van Vliet employed the Campanella melodic technique for the majority of the composition, in order to help the film come alive through sound. “I knew I wanted to create an emotional ambiguity through dissonance,” he explains. “So there’s a lot of layering, to create and build up to a kind of swell.”

With a long history of working on Van Niekerk’s animations, and a practical understanding of the medium, Van Vliet’s knowledge of the process of stop-motion animation is integral to his way of working when it comes to Box cutters. 

Adds Van Niekerk: “As much as I’m in service of the sand, the material, and the image, Arnaud is always in service of the film, and the moving image, on a musical level.”

Generative and embodied narratives

Going into the initial storyboarding of Box cutters, Van Niekerk drew on a few key narrative moments from Kamfer’s poem, namely the headphones; the bread; the driver; and the grandmother. 

The protagonist of Box cutters wears a pair of headphones, and this became a rich moment for Van Niekerk. In addition to being a perfect channel for Van Vliet’s musical composition – a gritty, driving soundtrack equal parts dreamlike and full of tension – they also become a visual solve for the story’s central violence. 

“The question I had was: How do you portray violence in a way that leaves space for the audience to imagine, and come up with their own understanding of that violence?” says Van Niekek. “I wanted viewers to interpret it in their own way as much as possible.” 

The visual motif of the abandoned headphones and their tangled cables blending into a verdant landscape, became one of the strongest moments in the film. 

Similarly, the mention of bread in the original text became a rich moment for Van Niekerk, who drew on the visual choreography and gritty sonic texture of a bread-slicing machine to produce one of her favourite moments in the film. 

Two central characters – the initially cautious and ultimately unsympathetic driver, and the protagonist’s grandmother – also provided the opportunity to attach meaning and further communicate the narrative of Box cutters. 

While the driver served as an essential moment for Van Niekerk, helping her realise that the representation of these characters is vital to the narrative and would never be neutral, the slight, loaded gesture of the grandmother removing her glasses became a way to grapple with sadness, endurance, and ultimately the resolution of the films ending. 

Similarly, in order to “discover” the characters, Van Niekerk found that she needed to make use of an embodied process – exploring and discovering their gestures and postures by physically acting them out. For the character of the driver, Van Niekerk asked a colleague to sit for her in order to get the posture of a person seated in a car. The facial expression of this colleague led to an incidental moment – the startled and somewhat unsympathetic expression of the character in the film.  

– David Mann

PHOTOGRAPHER | Zivanai Matangi 

CREDITS:

CONCEPTUALISERS | Naomi van Niekerk & Athena Mazarakis
ARTIST | Naomi van Niekerk 
MUSICIAN | Arnaud van Vliet