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

CFLGI x VALDEMARS SLOT | SVENDBORG, DENMARK

In Summer 2026, The Centre for the Less Good Idea brought a combination of short-form film, art, and performance to the spaces of Valdemars Slot, Denmark.

From 4 May 2026, The Centre’s co-founder & director Bronwyn Lace, the Impresario, Neo Muyanga and three invited South African performers — Anathi Conjwa, Micca Manganye, and Thulani Chauke — embarked on a creative research residency.

Designed to engage the palace, the library, its history and the local artistic community in Svendborg and more broadly in to Denmark, the artists worked towards a series of weekend activations that took place from 23 to 25 May. 

THE ATTIC | FILMS BY WILLIAM KENTRIDGE & THE CENTRE FOR THE LESS GOOD IDEA

The Attic has been transformed into an intimate studio environment, featuring short films by William Kentridge and collaborating artists from The Centre for the Less Good Idea. With a combination of soft furnishing from the palace and, in Kentridge’s signature style, Persian rugs and found antique chairs, viewers are invited to sit amongst these remnants of the studio process while watching the films.

On one half of The Attic, Kentridge’s As If, Episode 05 from his Self Portrait as a Coffeepot film. Here, Kentridge is in conversation with himself in the studio, atop a tall wooden horse, continuing the themes of the Studio Horse sculpture in the palace’s Entrance Hall.

On the other side of The Attic is an hour of looped miniature films, taken from The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s Long Minute series, starting with Kentridge’s 2ndary Revisions film. These miniature narratives are examples of a uniquely generative method of the short-form that has become an essential way of working at The Centre. A format first explored at The Centre during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is now extended to a group of collaborating artists in Denmark and beyond. 

THE STAIRCASE | FIRE WALKER & CHALKBOARD RUBRICS

Down the narrow staircase, once used by the palace’s servants, text-based rubrics by William Kentridge and The Centre for the Less Good Idea appear and disappear. These rubrics function like playfully instructive aphorisms for the act of making – fragments of language that sit on the periphery of creativity, curiosity, and process.

Viewed from the bottom, on the way up to The Attic, William Kentridge’s Fire Walker runs up the staircase. Fire Walker functions as a symbol of Johannesburg, first installed as a public sculpture representing the women street vendors who appear in the city in the early mornings with a burning brazier on their heads in order to sell food to labourers entering the city from the outskirts. Installed here as a fragmented drawing on the staircase, it speaks both to the tenuous nature of survival in the city, and to Kentridge and The Centre’s continued interest in facilitating collage, fragmentation and peripheral thinking within our processes and work.

THE ENTRANCE HALL | STUDIO HORSE 3

In the long tradition of equestrian statues and painting, the horse would be substituted for a piece of gymnastic equipment, a high chair on which the human figure could sit while the artist did their work. With this image in mind, we see the deep absurdity behind every equestrian portrait. From this standpoint, it makes it possible for us to reject certainty, question grand narratives and interrogate the legacy of colonialism and imperialism. Situated in close proximity to the King’s Room, which features historical paintings of the kings and noblemen of the palace, on horseback. Framing the sculpture is a collection of the palace’s maps, floor plans, ledgers, letters, postcards, and other material archives, used here as a collage of time and history through paper. Together, the installation is a comical provocation towards the fragmentation of meaning between history and legacy, performativity and absurdity.

THE CARRIAGE BARN | THE SHADOW OF SPACE

The Carriage Barn features Thulani Chauke’s installation, The Shadow of Space. The use of shadows and the silhouette are consistent motifs throughout The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s collective practice, as well as in the work of William Kentridge. The shadow’s ability to facilitate dialogue with oneself, to embrace multiplicity and to dance with the many versions of oneself is central to this work.

Here, Chauke is in conversation with Mendelson, but he is also shifting his identity from that of the boxer to the ballet dancer, while inviting the audience to collaborate with him and share a dance with him, to play with shadows and transform into performers themselves. During its installation in The Carriage Barn, The Shadow of Space will also be activated by invited collaborators who will provide responsive, performative and musical moments.

THE CORN BARN | FEAST OR FAMINE

Bronwyn Lace’s Feast or Famine depicts Southern African carrion beetles feasting on the remains of a common European barn owl. As the bird’s body decomposes, its decay nurtures the beetles’ regeneration, underscoring death’s role in sustaining life.

Incidentally, The Corn Barn is home to a European Barn Owl. She is a constant presence in the space, scattering elements of her feathers and nest. Lace has been methodically sweeping these elements into the corners of the installation, drawing subtle, yet enduring connections between life and death, certainty and uncertainty, Southern Africa and Northern Europe.  

The triangular proportions of The Corn Barn lend the space a chapel-like feel – a space of reverence and resonance. As the owl in Lace’s work decomposes and recomposes, there is a perennial dance between life and death, both on the floor in the projection and between the dead owl in the work and the living owl in the rafters above.

An immersive sound installation accompanies the work. Initially, the mournful song appears to evoke the Latin Lacrimosa hymn Dies irae. Deeper listening reveals the piece is not pronouncing “Pie Jesu”, but rather a subversion of the Catholic relic that reiterates, “Uphi Yesu?” – a Nguni phrase meaning “Where is/are you, God?”. Activated in this way, it becomes a work that also challenges historical and spiritual hegemony.

— David Mann