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

WHAT’S ON AT THE CENTRE | JAN - MARCH 2025
AT THE CENTRE
- COLLATION 1 | ON AIR: VISUAL RADIO PLAYS
- COLLATION 2 | SOUNDING PICTURES: LIVE SCORES TO SHORT SILENT FILMS
SO Academy
THE CENTRE OUTSIDE THE CENTRE
- ABOUT
- CFLGI x FONDATION CARTIER (2024)
- 2024
- 2023
- 2022
- 2021
- 2020
- 2019
FOR ONCE
Season Archive
Tickets
SO | ACADEMY BOOKINGS
THE TEAM
About

THE HIGHWAY NOTICE PROJECT

On the 1st of October 2020, The Centre for the Less Good Idea launched a 6 months project titled The Highway Notice Project.

The Highway Notice Project was created in response to the Corona crisis and the need for continued physical distancing. Two billboards on the M1 and M2 highway in Johannesburg were identified to hold a series of newly commissioned monthly artworks.

In this final video, curator of the project, Bronwyn Lace invited performer, writer and musician Bongile Lecoge-Zulu to respond to the series.

Participating and collaborating artists, writers and poets |

Frank Meintjies, Oratile Konopi, Jessica Webster, Koleka Putuma & Manyano Media, Linda Rademan, Oupa Sibeko, Sindiso Nyoni, Upile Chisala, Wezile Mgibe, William Kentridge, Faith XLVII / Liberty Du and African Ginger / Seth Pimentel

BREATHE & WEIGH ALL TEARS.

The first highway works are by the founder of The Centre for the Less Good Idea, William Kentridge, 'Breathe,' and 'Weigh All Tears'.

Much of the Centre’s collaborative and methodological approaches have been drawn directly out of Kentridge’s practice. In William’s words, “Often, you start with a good idea. It seems crystal clear at first, but when you take it off the proverbial drawing board, cracks and fissures emerge, and they cannot be ignored. It is the process of following the secondary ideas, those ‘less good ideas’ coined to address the first idea’s cracks, that the Centre nurtures, arguing that in the act of playing with an idea, you can recognise those things you didn’t know in advance but knew somewhere inside of you.”

The Centre’s visual identity is based on William's ‘Blue Rubrics’, a series he began after receiving a gift of pure lapis lazuli gouache from Afghanistan. In order to find a use for the vivid blue pigment he addressed it in terms of its specific colour and material, eventually mixing it into ink to overlay silkscreen prints. In William’s words, “They are called Blue Rubrics, but a rubric really should be red – a rubric was the printed or illuminated red text in a liturgical manuscript, in which the black ink would have been the text of the liturgy and the red would have been instructions on how to pray. So they are footnotes to a thought, the edges of the thought. In my case they are unsolved riddles, phrases which hover at the edge of making sense, these are fragments of sentences which sit in a drawer of phrases used in other work over the years, they get taken out and sorted through on occasions."

‘NDIPHENDULE- Answer Me (+27) BUA LE ÉNÉ - South Africa Talk to her/him’ ⁣⁣

For the month of November 2020 the billboard on the M2 West Freeway, facing traffic travelling West, Faraday, Johannesburg was occupied by the artwork of Oratile ‘Papi’ Konopi⁣⁣.

⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣The piece falls within a body of ‘Ênê’ (2017-), the Setswana genderless pronoun referring to ‘him’ or ‘her’, is an artistic body of work which Konopi initially developed as a way to begin to explore what he understood as a ‘matrix of masculinities’, and ideas which surround the masculine. The work became saturated with endless entanglements, ambiguities , contradictions and multiple potentialities of ideas around gender and sexuality. In these complexities, Bua Le Ênê (2018-) began to develop. This is a continuation of the Ênê series, and focuses on gender relations, thinking through the site of popular imagery and language to foreground a conversation around constructed gender relationships and how they are negotiated on a daily basis of people's lived experiences. ⁣⁣

Oratile ‘Papi’ Konopi is a multi- disciplinary visual artist, writer, and curator with a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand. Konopi is a curator and integral part of the BKhz Studio & Gallery based in Braamfontein. Konopi’s work is influenced by his daily migration between different spaces, multiple communities and ‘positionality’.⁣⁣

⁣QAPHELA

The second billboard for November 2020 on the Braamfontein Shunting Yard, M1 Freeway facing traffic travelling North, Johannesburg, was occupied by the artwork of Sindiso Nyoni (R!OT). ⁣

⁣Nyoni’s work primarily consists of a pencil, ink, pastels, gauche, acrylic and digital media fusion, to create a subversive ‘street’ style. His work has been published locally; exhibited at International Biennial Poster Exhibitions, New York, London, Berlin, Madrid, Teneriffe, Zagreb, The Vitra Design Museum, The Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, and The Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City.⁣

Sindiso Nyoni, also known as R!OT, is a self developed Graphic artist, contemporary illustrator, activist, street-artist, and multidisciplinary graphic designer. Nyoni holds a BTech degree in Graphic Design from the University of Johannesburg and has worked as an illustrator and art director in the South African advertising sector.⁣

Please feed your sons the same softness you feed your daughters.

In December 2020 and January 2021, one of the artworks occupying the M2 West Freeway, facing traffic travelling West, Faraday billboard was a collaboration between artist Linda Rademan and poet Upile Chisala. Rademan used embroidery to illustrate Chisala’s poetry:

Please feed your sons the same softness you feed your daughters.

Linda Rademan is an illustrator and full-time artist. Here Linda combines the subversive strategy of embroidery as fine art with the actual act of stitching in order to ‘suture’ alternative identities.

Upile Chisala is a storyteller, sociologist and activist. Upile’s hope is to tell stories from the margins and through her work help others and herself come to terms with pasts, celebrate presents and confidently dream beautiful futures.

Healing will come for us too.

⁣The second billboard for December 2020 and January 2021 on the Braamfontein Shunting Yard, M1 Freeway facing traffic travelling North, Johannesburg, was occupied by the artwork from a powerful collaboration between artist Jessica Webster and poet Upile Chisala. Webster created a painting that is part of something that is yet to come,echoing the words of Chisala’s poem:

Healing will come for us too.

Jessica Webster is a conceptual painter whose work is labour-intensive, complex in range of theme and materiality, and installation based. Jessica was mentored by artist Penny Siopis during her PhD in Philosophy, this mentorship led to the development of a close analysis of painting as it regards the embodied "sexuality'' of the painted surface. Webster’s ideas address painting as re-articulations of psychosomatic events which reveals modern painting at its most robust: where it lays bare the aesthetic ideals of the enlightenment project, as traumatic.

Upile Chisala is a storyteller, sociologist and activist. Raised in Zomba, Upile’s hope is to tell stories from the margins and through her work help others and herself come to terms with pasts, celebrate presents and confidently dream beautiful futures. She writes affirming, empowering and encouraging pieces on joy, identity, spirituality, femininity, beauty, love and loss.

If a career jumpstart was a person

In the month of February 2021, ‘If a career jumpstart was a person’ could be seen on M2 West Freeway, facing traffic travelling West near Faraday in Johannesburg and is by Oupa Sibeko, an interdisciplinary performance artist whose work moves between performance installation, photography, film and community based activism.

Oupa’s playful, often humorous and at times satirical approach deals with the matter and politics of the body as a contested site of labour, and as an object that assimilates the spirit of the moment and adapts to its environment.

THE GAGGING AIR

For February 2021, the billboard on the M1 Freeway, near Braamfontein Shunting Yard hosted the artwork of a collaboration between artist Wezile Mgibe and poet Frank Meintjies. A photograph of a performance installation by Mgibe is accompanied by Meintjies’ poetry:

the gagging air, the jobless young
the shaft that injects my blood
into the earth and sucks out gold

Wezile Mgibe is an artist whose interdisciplinary practice encompasses performance, dance, film, and installation as a tool for social change. Wezile’s work confronts prejudices and advocates against social inequality by creating a platform for critical self-reflexivity within unwelcoming spaces. His work is influenced by how things have come to existence, as well as motivations behind certain movements, reactions, human behaviours, and mostly how these become symbols. Wezile’s site-specific projects are developed in a continuous series format in an aim to interrogate the dynamics of site, place, culture, and belonging.

Frank Meintjies is a poet/writer and an organisational and social change practitioner. Frank has spent more than 30 years working in development, mainly within non-governmental organisations.

He has written on the history of Katlehong Arts Centre and the Culture and Working Life Project; it focused on the roles and impacts of documentary filmmaking, libraries within poor communities, and on the worker, culture and language oppression in the workplace. He is also the co-editor of the book titled ‘Voices of the Transition; the politics, poetics and practices of social change in South Africa’ (2004).

BLACK GIRL LIVE

The final billboards in the Highway Notice Project series are up and are dedicated to the project and campaign [BLACK GIRL LIVE].

March 2021 saw a collaboration between Koleka Putuma and African Ginger, with their artwork on the billboard on the M1 Freeway, near Braamfontein Shunting Yard.

[BLACK GIRL LIVE] was founded in 2019 by Theatre Practitioner, writer and poet, Koleka Putuma -Artist, Manyano Media is a multidisciplinary creative company established to create employment and development opportunities, as well as platforms for independent poets, playwrights, theatre directors, set designers, costume designers, lighting technicians and editors in South Africa who identify as black, queer and woman.

African Ginger is Seth Pimentel, an illustrator, painter and experimental visual artist. Seth pushes the boundaries of visual art's conventions by merging traditional and digital work into a hybrid of experimentation. Continuously drawing and developing his style and approach, Seth often creates in order to approach and discuss mental illness, his practice highlights the nuances in his own personal experiences of dealing with mental health, through this he seeks to build visual bridges to others.

Visit the website / online store (https://www.kolekaputuma.com/shop) to pledge your support to the [BLACK GIRL LIVE]

EVERY THREE HOURS

A collaboration between Faith XLVII and Koleka Putuma.

"South African women are brave. Strong. And not just a little strong.

They are strong down to their bone marrow. They have known great great suffering. And still they sing.

What an honor it's been to know such women!

I've been humbled in my life again and again by the sheer resilience of friends. The pain is inexplicable . In the first 3 weeks of lockdown more than 120 000 cases of Gender Based Violence were reported across the country. We are exhausted from the news each week.

Our sisters, mothers, grandmothers, our children violated, abused and murdered.

Working on this project alongside Koleka Putuma is not something I take lightly, Koleka is a force. Her words break up open in order to really have real conversations about what’s happening."

Words by Liberty Du, who is widely recognized as Faith47 / Faith XLVII, is a South African Multi-Disciplinary Artist. Her journey into art began on the streets of South Africa in 1979, as a young graffiti writer taking on the name Faith47.

Visit the https://kolekaputuma.com/shop store to pledge your support to the [BLACK GIRL LIVE] .

THE HIGHWAY NOTICE PROJECT

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BREATHE & WEIGH ALL TEARS.

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‘NDIPHENDULE- Answer Me (+27) BUA LE ÉNÉ - South Africa Talk to her/him’ ⁣⁣

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⁣QAPHELA

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Please feed your sons the same softness you feed your daughters.

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Healing will come for us too.

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If a career jumpstart was a person

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THE GAGGING AIR

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BLACK GIRL LIVE

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EVERY THREE HOURS

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