THE LONG MINUTE

THE LONG MINUTE, curated by Bronwyn Lace is a series of online videos shared on the #lessgoodidea social media platforms. SERIES 1 was shared over the course of April, May and early June 2020 and SERIES 2 from August to October 2020.

The Centre for the Less Good Idea, based in downtown Johannesburg, South Africa, is a physical and immaterial space to pursue incidental discoveries made in the process of producing new work. The Long Minute was the Centre’s direct response to the removal of our ability to physically be with one another. The Long Minute sought to find virtual strategies of pursuing incidental discoveries and processes of sharing and responding to one another collectively and collaboratively.

The Centre views these fragments of text, performance, image, and dance from the studios and homes of artists as prompts to seek free-spirited, transdisciplinary, collaborative, and alternative realities. The combinations of body, sound, space, and technology assist us in unpacking the nature of performance, the language of loss, and the relationship between audience member, and performer.

As founder and mentor at the Centre, William Kentridge created regular minute long pieces for the series. These miniature works hold potent threads in much of Kentridge’s larger body of work and seminally reveal what he brings as a mentor to the processes at the Centre. The Centre's collaborative, methodological approaches have been drawn directly out of Kentridge’s practice and have given the Centre and its to date over 400 invited artists an unparalleled momentum.

Bronwyn Lace is a visual and performance artist. In early 2016 Lace joined Kentridge in the establishing and animating of the Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg. Today Lace is a co-director on the board of the Centre and is living and working in Vienna, Austria.

AND THIS YOU SAY IS MY LIFE

William Kentridge is a draughtsman, performer, and filmmaker, as well as the founder of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

Launching The Long Minute is Kentridge’s latest notebook musing ‘and this you say is my life’ in which the artist draws on texts from poets Anna Akhmatova and Yehuda Amichai, as well as the book of Ecclesiastes.

Concept & Creation | William Kentridge
Musicians | Micca Manganye & Volley Nchabeleng
Video Editor & Compositor | Žana Marović
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

LA COMUNIÓN DE TICS, GESTOS Y ADEMANES

David Thatanelo April is a dancer, choreographer, and performing artist and was the co-curator of The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s 5th Season. Javier Velázquez Cabrero  is a visual artist and dancer who collaborated with Teresa Phuti Mojela on the 2018 For Once performance ‘Pedi’ at The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

Having met in Johannesburg in late 2018, April and Cabrero are intending to develop a hybrid body of dance, building on and connecting to one another’s gestures while drawing on various existing dance forms such as Indlamu (traditional Zulu dance), Setapa (traditional Tswana dance), Flamenco (traditional Spanish dance) and street dance. Here the two have manifested a physical dialogue by revealing the stages of their exchange. Music for this Long Minute is by another frequent collaborator at The Centre, João Renato Orecchia Zúñiga who has collaborated on Seasons 1, 3, and 5.

EVEN FURTHER AWAY

Sue Pam-Grant is an actor, writer, and interdisciplinary artist who has collaborated on Seasons 5 and 7 at The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

Here, Pam-Grant makes use of a series of textual fragments on masks to explore the early stages of the Covid 19 pandemic as an artist.

“‘Even Further Away’ is the merging of parallel conversations between my postscript reflections from my Performance Art / Encounter ‘Duel/Duet: The Every Love Story’ and our current apocalyptic encounter, ‘Love in the Time of Corona’. The Postscript Mask Objects (A series of 41 Masks, the last one being ‘#41, EVEN FURTHER AWAY’ was made in February 2020, 10 days before the first positive recording of Covid 19 in South Africa.) The title for that iteration was ‘Sirens of Silence’. ‘Even Further Away’, is a reminder that the artist must ‘Continue to Make’ in order to ‘Continue to Breathe’...” – Sue Pam- Grant 2020.

[EN]COUNTER

[EN]COUNTER is a conversation between performer, dancer, writer, and choreographer Smangaliso Ngwenya, and choreographer and curator of The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s 5th Season David Thatanelo April. This minute is a confined staging of the body in relation to the counter, the cupboard, and the kitchen.

Concept & Performance | Smangaliso Ngwenya
Video Editor & Compositor | Smangaliso Ngwenya & Noah Cohen
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

COUNTING SECONDS

William Kentridge is a draughtsman, performer, and filmmaker, as well as the founder of The Centre for the Less Good Idea. Self-interrogation is central to the work of Kentridge. This Long Minute reminds us of his ‘Drawing Lessons’, a collection of his thoughts on art, art-making, and the studio.

In an interview with The Arts Newspaper in June 2019, Kentridge says: “For anyone who has ever written or drawn anything, ever recorded themselves speaking or singing, there’s an enormous difference to one’s sense of self in the moment of making and when you take a step back to become the viewer…What seemed like such good writing the night before, when you re-read it the next morning, you say: ‘I couldn’t have written anything so stupid, some other idiot did it.’ And you curse yourself. That shifting between yourself as the maker and yourself as the viewer is something that is very obvious in the studio, but it is often less painfully obvious in the rest of your life. So that’s one of the ways in which the things that are natural in the studio often serve to make things that are invisible in daily life very present. And I suppose with the Drawing Lessons and a lot of my work, that is the aim.”

Concept & Performance | William Kentridge
Video Editor & Compositor | Žana Marović
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

SOMEONE ALONE IN HIS ROOM

Jonah Sack is a visual artist working across the realms of painting, sculpture, video, and artist’s books, all of which stem from his practice of drawing. Sack collaborated on Season 5 of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

In the artist’s words: “The piece came from a series of drawings I was making using found texts. I had been working with descriptions of dreams, and thinking about the changes in experience we undergo every day. I came across a piece of writing from Wittgenstein, which wasn't about dreams but rather about shifts in the kind of attention we pay to everyday objects and events. He asks us to imagine looking in on the life of a real person, not as engaged participants but as floating observers – seeing the events ‘under the aspect of eternity’. Something about that stance creates a sense of the uncanny and the wondrous, even though we're only seeing things we observe everyday. That sense of distance, isolation, and observation-from-a-distance seemed incredibly applicable to our current moment, as did the phrase ‘Someone alone in his room’. In a sense, at the moment we are each both the ‘someone’ alone in their room, and the hovering, disengaged onlooker.”

Concept & Creation | Jonah Sack
Video Editor | Jonah Sack
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

WASHING SECONDS

Thami Majela is an actor, dancer, and performing artist who collaborated on the 7th Season at The Centre, in which he explored the affective nature of the written word. In this ‘Long Minute’ Majela transforms the everyday gestures of washing oneself into a poetic and intimate moment upon which to reflect.

Concept & Performance | Thami Majela
Video Editor & Compositor | Noah Cohen
Music | Hilary Hahn, ‘J.S. Bach: Sonata for Violin Solo No. 1 in G Minor, BWV 1001 - 4. Presto’
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

HOW FAR WILL SHOCK TRAVEL?

An explorative, text-based piece by Sam Kentridge, ‘How Far Will Shock Travel’ makes use of the printed word in motion for this contemplative Long Minute and asks: How far will this travel?

Concept & Creation | Sam Kentridge
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

HOLD

William Kentridge is a draughtsman, performer, and filmmaker, as well as the founder of The Centre for the Less Good Idea. Kentridge has often said that drawings are demonstrations of how we can make sense of the world. This Long Minute sees the artist once again putting drawings to work.

Concept & Creation | William Kentridge
Musicians | Micca Manganye & Volley Nchabeleng
Video Editor & Compositor | Janus Fouché
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

FRANZ KAFKA | DIE UMWANDLUNG

Dan Selsick is a sessional trombonist and composer for film and television who also runs his own recording studio in Johannesburg. Selsick is a long time collaborator of William Kentridge and has participated in Seasons 1, 2 and, 7 at the Centre for the Less Good Idea. ‘Die Umwandlung’ is the German title for ‘Metamorphosis’ written by Franz Kafka in 1912. Selsick presents a radio play composed for eight instruments in this Long Minute.

Hörspiel Für 8 Instrumente Composer | Dan Selsick
Performers | Dan Selsick & Peter Jaspan
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

DREAM | UBUTHONGO

Princess Tshabangu is a singer, composer, guitarist, lyricist, actor, theatre writer, and director.

Tshabangu has a keen interest in the politics of power, gender, spirituality, and the subliminal, much of which is explored in this Long Minute.

Concept & Performance | Princess Tshabangu
Musician | Princess Tshabangu
Video Editor | Themba Mkhoma
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

WHAT NO ONE KNEW YESTERDAY

Ben Stanwix is an artist based in Cape Town. His Long Minute, titled ‘What No One Knew Yesterday’ is his response to the restrictions of making a minute long work alongside the restrictions placed generally upon the world during a global pandemic.

“As to the minute, which was an interesting restriction to work with - I'd been thinking about some of the basic restrictions on daily life, the freedom to move, or to gather, and trying to find studio objects that could be made to run around, to stand in for that lack. There are also concerns unrelated to the physical body - how the news cycle makes one so aware of state power, borders and displays of nationalism, but also simpler things, like how my perception of shapes has been transformed into an immediate association with proportions, percentages and graphs," – Ben Stanwix.

Concept & Creation | Ben Stanwix
Musician | Jonathan Sweetman
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

FLOATING WORLD

This collaborative and contemplative Long Minute is by visual artist Robyn Penn, and session musician Waldo Alexander, both of whom live and work in Johannesburg.

“My work has always involved an immersion in nature, a sense of awe and the sublime and a preoccupation with the nature of time. I grew up, and have lived most of my adult life, in Johannesburg where the sublime arrives in the form of cloud formations that pile up daily. Change is ubiquitous as evidenced in this natural process of transformation and dissolution. Time (as Aristotle suggested) is the measurement of change, not of being, but of becoming, made up of events, processes, chaos and entropy.

In ‘Floating World’ I wanted to diarise my everyday and the transience of each passing moment. I live in my childhood home on a hill above a vast veld with a view of the city and the extensive highveld sky. I then discussed the piece with violinist Waldo Alexander and asked if he would respond to my film. The orchestration is as mesmerizing as the clouds. The quiet slow, haunting pace is beautifully contrasted by the swift, turbulent motion of the clouds,” - Robyn Penn

Concept & Creation | Robyn Penn
Musician | Waldo Alexander
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

CHAIR WALTZ

William Kentridge is a draughtsman, performer, and filmmaker, as well as the founder of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

‘Chair Waltz’ sees Kentridge exploring, among other things, movement, music, performance, and absence in the context of continued creative collaboration during a time of distance, loss, and global upheaval.

Concept & Performance | William Kentridge
Video Editor & Compositor | Žana Marović
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

CORONA CORRIDOR

Lulu Mlangeni is a powerful dancer and performer and is the 2020 Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner for Dance. Mlangeni has participated in Seasons 2 and 5 at The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

‘Corona Corridor’ is a Long Minute exploring movement and physicality in the confines of the home during South Africa’s stringent lockdown conditions in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Concept & Performance | Lulu Mlangeni
Video Editor | Noah Cohen
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

RE-MEMBERING

Slindile Mthembu is an award-winning playwright, director, dramaturg, and theatre-maker.

Mthembu’s response to the Long Minute is an act of editing existing staged performance into the confines of a minute. Here, Mthembu explores the staging of memory through the lived experience of the black women. She seeks to collapse habitual, chronological, and often one-dimensional narrative structures depicting black women and their lives.

Concept & Creation | Slindile Mthembu
Video Editor | Slindile Mthembu
Composer | Thembinkosi Mavimbela
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

PRISONER IN A BOOK

William Kentridge is a draughtsman, performer, and filmmaker, as well as the founder of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

In an interview with Marian Goodman Gallery about his contributions to the Long Minute series, Kentridge said:

“This has been for me a very quiet time, with many weeks of not travelling, of simply working in the studio. I’m conscious of being particularly fortunate, in the circumstances, of having a studio in the garden as I’m very aware of many other artists who can’t actually get into their studios because they are in different areas to where they live; and of the difference of being an artist who can keep at work compared with dancers, actors and some musicians for whom it is impossible to even practice their métier, let alone get paid for it, because they don’t have access to dance studios, rehearsal spaces and so on.

To continue work at the centre during the period of social isolation and lockdown, we invited participants, alumni of the centre, to make one-minute films, using their cell phones as cameras, for a series called ‘The Long Minute’, so every day we’ve been posting different films by filmmakers, dancers, authors, musicians on Instagram and Facebook.

Because the lockdown has meant being without the many participants and collaborators I would usually work with in the studio. Today’s post is the sixth of these one-minute films, which are connected with ‘The Natural History of the Studio’, a new, broader project dwelling on the solitary activities of the studio, which of course are the major part of it – of drawings, of animations – trying to work out the relationship, in a way, between the activities of the studio and thinking.”

Concept & Creation | William Kentridge
Video Editor & Compositor | Žana Marović
Music | Joseph Haydn Piano Sonata No. 62 in E-Flat Major, Hob. XVI_52_ II. Adagio
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

(A TASTE OF) WHAT'S TO COME

Waldo Alexander is a session musician and regular collaborator at The Centre for the Less Good Idea as well as with William Kentridge.

In the artist's words: “In comparison to the vast majority of the country and the planet, I live in luxury. I'm safe. Secure in a comfortable suburban home, with a beautiful garden. My concerns over the future, my career, income etc feel trivial. Wrong. Like an indulgent privilege. While billions face challenges far graver than mine.

Thus, in my case, being tasked to draw on the restrictions of lockdown and to work within the "confines of my space" is not without irony. Physically, I am hardly restricted or confined. Constant awareness of this has stirred up deep shame and frustration with myself, and increasing anxiety over the uncertainty we're all facing.

Since I'm a musician, I began with the score. I've drawn on material from a larger composition titled ‘What's to come’, which I still need to complete. Given the circumstances, my ‘mood’, and the background of the music, I decided it would be an appropriate choice for this task. And the perfect opportunity for me to begin tackling my ‘restrictions.’

1. Never having learned to use recording software.
This audio recording is the result of my first attempt at using Logic Pro X (and I think it turned out pretty lekker).
I would like to extend my sincere gratitude and appreciation to Gavan Eckhardt from Soulfire Studios for mastering the track, and for his generous advice and guidance through this part of the process, as well as to Adam Howard from Howard Audio, for setting me up with his old Mac and all its included bells and whistles.
2. Never having made a video.
The only device available to me for filming is my cellphone. And its camera only works in selfie mode. Which, having decided to experiment with stop-motion video for the first time too (with my piggy), was an additional restriction. And made me very cross. One day, I'll treat myself to a new phone.
3. Never having edited video footage and audio.
I downloaded Adobe Rush editing software onto my cellphone to complete the task. A computer, or anything bigger, would have been more suitable for this part of the process. But again, I think the whole thing turned out pretty lekker. And perhaps one day, l'll be able to upscale.
A huge thank you to William, Bronwyn and all at Team Less Good Idea for this valuable opportunity. I never thought I'd be able to come to grips with new tech skills so quickly, and I now have an abundance of new creative methods and tools to explore during lockdown.”

Composer & Performer | Waldo Alexander
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

STUDY NO. 1

Terrapin is a puppet theatre based in Tasmania, Australia. Terrapin creates contemporary puppetry experiences for a multigenerational audience, touring nationally and internationally.

This Long Minute sees director Sam Routledge and composer Dylan Sheridan attempt to make orange juice over a distance of two metres.

Concept & Performance | Sam Routledge & Dylan Sheridan
Music | Cello Suite No.1 In G Major, BWV 1007 by Johann Sebastian Bach, Performed by Pierre Fournier (Creative Commons Zero 1.0)
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

SO MUCH IN COMMON

‘So Much in Common’ is a minute-long fragment of a collaboration between artists Javier Velázquez Cabrero (Spain/Mexico) and Thembi Ngwenya (South Africa) which took place at the Nirox Foundation just outside of Johannesburg.

In describing the process, the dancer/choreographers share these key moments and thoughts:

“To begin with, Javier shared hand movements from Spanish singers from the 90’ with Thembi. They interest him because they evoke emotion, passion, sorrow and temperament. Thembi played with these gestures and transformed them into her own. Once the two were dancing and filming they noticed the camera was a dancer and an audience member simultaneously.

Thembi describes dance as an expression of joy, sadness, love, and hope but seminally as a connection with her god, her ancestors, and the ground.”

A STUDY OF LIMINALITY

FAITH XLVII is an internationally acclaimed South African street and studio-based artist who participated in Season 2’s Invisible Exhibition at The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

Faith describes making this work through “vast emotions of pendulum sway’ during this period of global crisis. The video is a stop frame documentation of two drawings, ‘The Creative’, and ‘The Receptive’ which then led to a third work, ‘ A Study of Liminality’”

In Faith’s words: “Liminality from the Latin word līmen, meaning ‘a threshold’ denotes a space/time between one's previous way of structuring one's identity, time, or community, and a new way.

In anthropology, it is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete.

During liminal periods of all kinds, social hierarchies may be reversed or temporarily dissolved, continuity of tradition may become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt. The dissolution of order during liminality creates a fluid, malleable situation that enables new institutions and customs to become established.”

Concept & Creation | FAITH XLVII
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

DOCUMENTARY

‘Documentary’ is a collaborative Long Minute by theatremaker Dintshitile Mashile and sound designer/percussionist Thokozani Nsibande.

The piece combines a collage of documentative sounds and manipulated footage and seeks to meditate on the post-dream state. The artists are interested in the representation of the often frustrating inability to fully recall one's dreams as well as the desire to share and represent those that are remembered.

Concept & Performance | Dintshitile Mashile
Sound Designer | Thokozani Nsibande
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

DANCING RHINOCEROS

William Kentridge is a draughtsman, performer, and filmmaker, as well as the founder of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

As a continuation of the thinking toward a broader project ‘The Natural History of the Studio’, the dancing rhino is a recurring theme in Kentridge’s work. ‘Dancing Rhinoceros’ is a playful Long Minute that sees Kentridge exploring movement and the act of putting drawings to work.

Concept & Creation | William Kentridge
Video Editor & Compositor | Žana Marović
Music | Track No. 01 El Botellero by Ibrahim Ferrer, from the Out & Out Cuban Music Compilation
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

PRESSINGCUTTINGTOUCHING

‘pressingcuttingtouching’ is a collaborative Long Minute by artists Nicola Pilkington, Cammille Behrens, and Joe Young.

The minute explores the sensations of touch, contact, and the limits thereof. The artists work across a wide range of mediums and each has close ties with production and staging at The Centre for the Less Good Idea. They come together now, across three cities, to show each other how they touch.

Concept & Performance | Nicola Pilkington, Cammille Behrens & Joe Young
Video Editor & Compositor | Nicola Pilkington
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING AND SO ON

Colijn Strydom is a visual artist living and working in Cape Town.

In Strydom’s words: “In the spirit of the Less Good Idea, I started with one thing, only to end up at another. My starting point was the question: how do I inhabit my body in a way that is not determined by patriarchal norms? Or, how do I queer my body - from the inside out? Being a painter, I decided to look to painting (and Google) for an answer. I (naively) googled ‘50 famous paintings of women’, with the intention of taking on the pose of each sitter, in an attempt to understand my own body differently, find in it something new, a different way of ‘wearing’ my body, or just different from the posturing I had been taught to assume as a boy.

Predictably, what I found* were all paintings by white men (except for two by Artemisia Gentileschi). It was apparent that neither European art history nor Google’s algorithm was going to offer me the opening of possibilities I was seeking. What I ended up with looks to me like a choreography of the white male gaze, awkwardly projected on to my awkward, white, male body – with a momentary interruption courtesy of Gentileschi; possibly something that both shows the gaze and undermines it.” [Google search 2 May 2020: 50 Famous paintings of women]

* Only 32 paintings were suggested, not 50, and interestingly, there was no mention of the Mona Lisa.

Strydom used the first 18 of the paintings suggested by Google in order to fit into the 52 second limit. The paintings are:

Johannes Vermeer Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665); Édouard Manet Olympia (1865); Sandro Botticelli Birth of Venus (mid 1480’s); James Abbott McNeill Whistler Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871); Gustav Klimt Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1903 – 1907); Leonardo da Vinci Lady with Ermine (1489-1490); Francisco Goya La Maya desnuda (1797 - 1800); Frederic Leighton Flaming June (1985); John Singer Sargent Portrait of Madame X (1883 - 1884); Paul Gauguin Tahitian Women on the Beach (1891); John Everett Millais Ophelia (1851- 1852); Artemisia Gentileschi Judith slaying Holofernes (1612 - 1613); Amadeo Modigliani Nude Sitting on a Divan (1917); John Singer Sargent Portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner (1888); Gauguin Two Tahitian Women (1899); Giorgione and Titian Sleeping Venus (1510); Rogier van der Weyden Portrait of a Lady (1460); Titian Venus of Urbino (1534).

Concept & Performance | Colijn Strydom
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

IS THIS WHAT I LOOK LIKE or WHAT I FEEL LIKE?

Cynthia Schwertsik is a Viennese artist now living on a hill in South Australia.

In the artist’s words: “Meandering through life, I am blessed, but there are days like this where I wake up, not sure if I am in the right life, in the right skin? Why did I end up here? And: how is this ever going to make any sense? Increasingly I feel the need to double check my presence, I try to bridge the gap between the visual appearance and what is real through touch. As an everyday record I establish the changing profile of my landscape into paper.”

Concept & Performance | Cynthia Schwertsik
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

PRODUCTION LINE

Warrick Sony is a Cape Town-based musician, composer, and sound artist who has collaborated on Season 6 of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

Sony has a deep-seated interest in sound and politics, and his approach to the sonic arts is rooted in a solid DIY-aesthetic. Silence, machinery, and the binaries of work and play typically inform his explorations. ‘Production Line’ is a Long Minute exploring some of these interests.

Concept & Creation | Warrick Sony
Writer | David Mann
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

A REALITY

Marcus Neustetter is an artist, cultural activist and producer currently based in Vienna, Austria who has contributed Augmented Reality (AR) drawings to The Invisible Exhibitions of Seasons 2 and 5 of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

In ‘A Reality’, Neustetter captures and edits the outside view of an hour of the physical process of creating a new 3D sculptural drawing. The minute is also an extension of a sound/movement dialogue between Neustetter and dancer/vocalist Xolisile Bongwana. In 2017, after having met at The Centre, the two artists began their collaboration by creating the experimental performance ‘Right to Reflect’.

This Long Minute sees Neustetter manipulating and responding to Bongwana’s new music by moving through drawing in the virtual space. He uses the confines of the physical and virtual ‘room’ to determine his canvas and therefore his boundaries. The actual drawing remains invisible and inconsequential to us.

Concept & Creation | Marcus Neustetter
Musicians | Xolisile Bongwana & Hlubi Radebe
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

DESCENT INTO DEATH

Phumlani Mndebele is a dancer whose practice ranges from contemporary, to jazz and hip-hop. He has collaborated on Season 5 of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

Mndebele has an enormous capacity to allow his body to flow, curl, jolt and unfurl. At times he moves as if in a stop-motion animation sequence. Other times he is as fluid and unbound as the liquid element he personifies through his performance. Minimal manipulation of footage through editing in this Long Minute attempts to highlight these qualities. Sound for this Long Minute is composed and performed by the musician Waldo Alexander, another regular collaborator at The Centre.

SHE HOARDED HER INTENTION / A BUST ISN’T ENOUGH

Beatrice Scaccia is a visual artist based in New York. She seeks to amalgamate painting, drawing, animation and writing in the construction of her multidimensional works. At the heart of her practice is the need to create various characters as a means to reflect upon the absurdity of the human condition and the fragility of our identities.

In the artist’s words: “I decided to make a bust for the first time. I usually work with paintings, drawings and digital animation, but I have been visualising these busts in my mind for quite a while. I am an Italian in New York (double-stressed then), ‘sheltered-in-place’ in my small apartment since the end of March. Embracing something new and challenging seemed like a great idea, plus, Magazzino Italian Art (a beautiful Foundation upstate New York) asked me to produce an artwork during these isolated times.

In my imagination, my bust was dynamic, grotesque, fun, and disturbing... until I faced the medium and everything changed. I decided to work using some material/objects I have hoarded in the last year or so, intrigued with the concept of hoarding – so much around these days on the news. But the bust wasn't enough for me, and It didn't stand on its own; probably because I remain a 2D artist, but I don't know for sure. I therefore decided to turn the ‘working on the bust’ in to an animation. I built a set, I organised the lights and I started. All the dynamism I thought I could give to the form itself was added to the space around the form.

I'll keep going; but I have a feeling that the bust will never be finished, attracted, as I am, to the idea of failing over and over again.”

Concept & Performance | Beatrice Scaccia
Musician | Lionel Laquerriere
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

THE LEDGE OF SADNESS

Marta Moriarty is an artist and curator based in Madrid. ‘The Ledge of Sadness’, is a Long Minute that plays with time, language, and presence.

In Moriarty’s words: “It is home-made, just me, late at night, on the back stairway to our flat in Madrid. My cell phone camera perched on a kitchen stool on the tiny stair landing, I switch on the countdown for 10 seconds and begin, I’m running up and down the stairs like a crazy person, again and again. I love doing it, the repetition, the text soaking into me, the effort of my untrained body, the bare loneliness in the bare stairway, the cold light, the silence of the city, as it has been for the past two months, my husband sleeping upstairs and safe.

This is my text which I recite in Spanish:

Juego en el alero de la tristeza
Donde mirar hacia el fondo es tan doloroso que me hace reír.
Rutinas contra el olvido
Lejía contra el miedo,
Amor frente a tu letal vacío.
Y la esperanza de que aún en la derrota no saldré vencida
Porque la alegría seguirá conmigo.

And my english translation:

I play on the ledge of sadness
Where looking at the bottom is so painful that it makes me laugh
Routines against oblivion
Bleach against fear
Love facing your lethal void.
And the hope that even in defeat I will not be defeated
for joy will stand by me.”

Concept & Performance | Marta Moriarty
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

THERE AND BACK

Nicci Haynes is a visual artist based in Australia.

In the artist’s words: “I live in Canberra, Australia. At the moment I’m making mainly moving image work but my practice includes mad-scientist installations, print, drawing, and performance.

I made 'There and back’ using some paper printouts that I had available during lockdown with limited access to resources. I am the person in the images, which came from a video I made a while ago using my camera on a self-timer, hence the poor focus. Pacing back and forth across a room struck me as being apposite for our current situation: housebound and limited.

I have been trying to articulate to myself what it is that draws me to film*. I have a few thoughts about this: Film is like thought; it is a stream of ideas and a single finished fixed image rarely feels sufficient to capture what I wish to convey, whatever that may be. It also occurs to me the sequential revealing of film is text-like and text has a particular grip on me: Joyce, for instance, fascinates me for his peculiar language use, and Beckett also, with a linguistic style that someone described as ‘aphasic modernism’. I am also a printmaker, of etching mainly, and am never drawn to a final fixed version of plate, but to the ‘states’ of a plate that I continue to work; making a sequence of images over time, which equals film to my thinking. Another observation about my own films is that the process is always visible, and that feels important to me – more important than having the image in focus in this instance.

*I use the term ‘film’ but I rarely use film. I make sequences of images from drawings, sheets of paper, objects.”

Concept & Creation | Nicci Haynes
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

ME AND A PRINCE OF SERENDIP

Ann Gollifer is a visual artist whose practice includes painting, print-making, writing, and photography.

In the artist’s words: “A Prince of Serendip gate crashed the making of my video for The Long Minute. He stole the show. I sought revenge and painted his skull to wear as a mask.

I decided to make a video showing my process. It is physical as I use my body to form a graphite frame upon paper into which I pour the paint. I know what I am going to do but I never know what will happen as the paper bends and the paint dries. During this lockdown period I had only my own body to work with as I continued with my current series of paintings called ‘The Archaeology of love.’ I use earth pigments mixed into gum Arabic to make watercolours that reference our ancient relationship with the ochres, forming pathways from present to past. I am in search of sentient beings, excavating ancestors. The baboon’s intervention offered me that lucky coincidence that turns the mundane upside down to reveal something magical, a new and unexpected image. Serendipity.”

Concept & Creation | Ann Gollifer
Sound | Recordings made while workshopping toward Season 7 with Micca Manganye, Volley Nchabeleng & Vusi Mdoyi
Video Editor | Noah Cohen
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

UNTITLED (WATER PAINTING #18)

Richard Hart is a creative director, graphic designer, copywriter, illustrator, and art director based in New York.

In Hart’s words: “The video is a time-lapse of a three-hour drawing/painting session on found slate tiles and stones. I paint with water, which quickly evaporates, resulting in a constantly changing series of marks, which I respond and add to every ten seconds (the interval at which my iPad snaps another shot). It allows very little time for consideration, so my mark-making becomes incredibly immediate and spontaneous. These drawings have become a lifesaver during this time… they require no supplies beyond the surface and the brushes I use and can be done at home or out where I am alone and far from other people.”

Concept & Creation | Richard Hart
Music excerpt | ‘Oczy Mlody’, The Flaming Lips
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

A LAMP IS A GOOD ARTIST’S MODEL

Joana Villaverde is a visual artist living and working in Avis, Portugal.

Villaverde describes her Long Minute work as an ongoing and never-ending drawing, and often asks herself ‘How can people’s feelings be transformed into an object of art?’. She loves working with mistakes, dragging them out, cutting them up, glueing them together, ripping them up and then glueing them back together again.

Some translation for the text:

A lamp is a good artist’s model. A lamp keeps still.
A dog isn’t a good artist’s model. A dog moves.
A lamp is a good artist’s model. A lamp keeps still.

Concept & Creation | Joana Villaverde
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

THABANG THE MINUTE

Katleho Sekhosana is a writer, director, and performing artist who uses storytelling as a therapeutic tool, both for himself and his audiences.

Sekhosana’s Long Minute is an extract of a bigger piece he has been developing for some time. Titled ‘Thabang’ and first performed in Season 5 at the Centre for the Less Good Idea as an 11-minute Epic, ‘Thabang’ is an internal monologue made public and was originally accompanied by musician and vocalist Princess Tshabangu.

As described by writer David Mann “Heritage, lineage, loneliness and longing are the palpable thoughts and emotions filling up the stage, all communicated by Sekhosana’s distressed use of the body and voice, and Tshabangu’s quiet, but steadfast presence throughout – both as a conflicting voice and an accompanying thought”

Concept & Creation | Katleho Sekhosana
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

ONCE

Pedro Balbás is a curator, artist, and cultural agent currently based in Madrid.

“Plant a thought and watch it grow
Wind it up and let it go”
– Glen Hansard

In Pedro’s words: “‘Once’ is named after and inspired by the homonymous movie from which I have taken this introductory quote. It tells a story about many stories, it is a starting point to talk about things I once had, places I once was, loved ones I once had. Memories always make me wonder, for instance, what remains in ourselves when someone disappears? Will we ever revisit that place, that feeling, or that touch, still engraved in our skin? and how will it be then? Is it all lost? Obviously not. Everything we lose along the way is part of what we become in every step we take in this process of moving forward. Progress. Adaptation. A fact.

During these hard and uncertain weeks since the [Covid 19] outbreak, I’ve been going on with this almost like an obsession, looking at old notes and photos, drawings and texts, trying to make up with my past in some way as I know many others have, since loneliness and confinement bring us to introspection as long as we stay alert and listen. My little apartment has so far been my only scenario, here I have lately paid attention to details that I never noticed before. One of them has to do with a magic phenomenon that takes place in my bedroom: Everyday the sun goes through the window shutter and reflects multiple circle beams of light on my old chest of drawers, it happens only a few minutes before sunset and every single time it’s different, like an infinite creation. I’ve tried not to miss the spectacle ever since I discovered it. Perception sharpened.

In ‘Once’ I’ve cathartically connected that special moment of light to the action of taking out of a drawer some objects that are relevant and symbolic to me. My hand recognises them and lets them gently fall. The slow motion makes them seem heavy, maybe because they’re filled with emotions that weigh, with wounds that heal and with revealing mistakes.”

Concept & Creation | Pedro Balbás
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

E = mTEA2

Kaldi Makutike is a dancer, actor, and performing artist who has collaborated on Season 7 of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

Makutike’s Long Minute draws on a work he co-created for Season 7 called ‘Tea & Bae’, made with fellow performer Molebogeng Phiri. ‘Tea & Bae’ is a two-hander that favours synchronised choreography over the spoken word and explores storytelling as a form of bonding and intimacy.

Concept & Performance | Kaldi Makutike
Video Editor | Smangaliso Ngwenya
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

TENDING

Miche Fabre Lewin and Flora Gathorne-Hardy are two Suffolk, England-based women artists who are researchers dedicated to enlivening cultural and ecological diversity through socially-engaged arts.

Here they share images and sound created and captured during a ritual elegy to the earth.

Concept & Creation | Miche Fabre Lewin & Flora Gathorne-Hardy
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

MINER & ARTIST

William Kentridge is a draughtsman, performer, and filmmaker, as well as the founder of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

‘Miner and Artist’ is a distillation and continuation of the artist’s explorations on mining, a theme and metaphor that has occupied much of his work since the late 70s. This minute stirs matters of memory and amnesia, drawing and erasure. At this moment, and under our current conditions, the contrasts between the rich and the poor and the impacts of labour on the body and mind are particularly heightened. The lamenting, accompanying sound is composed by Nhlanhla Mahlangu.

Concept & Creation | William Kentridge
Composer | Nhlanhla Mahlangu
Vocalists | Xolisile Bongwana, Thulani Zwane, Siphiwe Nkabinde, Nhlanhla Mahlangu, Zama Maphumulo, Muzi Shili, Madla Sibanyoni & Sibusiso Shozi
Video Editor & Compositor | Žana Marović
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

ONE MINUTE MILTON

Mikhael Subotzky is an artist who works in multiple mediums, including film installation, video, photography, collage and painting. Subotzky was a collaborator on Season 7 of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

In the artist’s words: “Covid-19 has meant a shift in how the studio is working. I’ve set up a studio at home, and studio staff are also working remotely, but what has not changed is the intense animation process that I started during the Centre for Less Good Idea’s Season 7 workshops. That work, titled ‘Disorded, and Flatulent: A Work In Progress’, looks at the inheritance of wealth and woes through the lens of a violence given and violence received; privilege and pain passed on from one generation to the next. This chapter features three main characters: Jan van Riebeek, Rembrandt, and this talking fellow – Milton. ‘One Minute Milton’ is an experiment in bringing a printed image to (digital) life by hacking a number of programmes I know very little about.”

Concept & Creation | Mikhael Subotzky
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

UH JULIA BUILT UH BURIAL BOAT

Stephen Hobbs is a South African artist based in Ireland.

In the artist’s words: “Whilst traipsing down a narrow road in Dungarvan, County Waterford, Ireland, I came across two woman preparing the frontage of their soon-to-be-opened bakery. They were up on a ladder, busy removing the signage that belonged to the previous eatery – Raj Balti House. I asked if I could have the letters which they happily prepared for me in a black plastic bag.

The stop motion treatment of the letters making sense of themselves, as if in a game of scrabble, is accompanied by the sound of the sea at Myrtleville Beach in Cork. The intense gurgling of the pebbles as the tide pulls back into the sea is beautiful and hypnotic. Indeed, the recording is a trace of one of our last visits before lock down. The rest is history, except to say that the bakery owners' efforts and, more importantly their dreams, have halted all together as lockdown came upon us days later. Today they tell me they should be reopening in June / July”

Concept & Creation | Stephen Hobbs
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

This piece was featured alongside 28 other Long Minute videos at the ‘Unprecedented Times’ exhibition in Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria which ran from 5 June to 30 August 2020.

PAPER TREE

William Kentridge is a draughtsman, performer, and filmmaker, as well as the founder of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

‘Paper Tree’, which features music composed by Nhlanhla Mahlangu, forms part of Kentridge’s continued Long Minute works as a continuation of the thinking toward a broader project, ‘The Natural History of the Studio’.

Concept & Creation | William Kentridge
Composer | Nhlanhla Mahlangu
Vocalists | Nhlanhla Mahlangu, Xolisile Bongwana, Ayanda Nhlangothi, Zandile Hlatshwayo, Siphiwe Nkabinde & Sbusiso Shozi
Video Editor & Compositor | Žana Marović

FLUTING IT SAFE

Bongile Lecoge-Zulu is a musician, vocalist, writer, performer, and a regular collaborator at The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

Here, Lecoge-Zulu provides a humorous and ponderous take on practicing one’s craft under the conditions of a global health pandemic.

Concept & Creation | Bongile Lecoge-Zulu
Composer | Bongile Lecoge-Zulu
Video Editor | Zama Jolobe
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

TASTE OF SPRING

José Luis Vicario is a sculptor, poet, and researcher at the University of Granada, Spain.

In the artist’s words: “Through our windows in Andalucia, we have watched the onset of spring, 2020.

Only recently have we been able to leave our home, and we have found in the nearby hills that nature has been working actively during many past weeks without us. I went walking out through the fields, trying to sense and to savour time lost. As if I were an appropriate vase for the flowers of the gutter.”

Concept & Creation | José Luis Vicario
Images of | Jon Charnas
Music | Garikoitz Fraga (Belleza Infinita Ed.)
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

TAROT READING

Camilla Dely (South Africa) and Tatiana Kahvegian (Brazil) are visual artists and theatre designers based in Brooklyn, NY. Their collaboration began after meeting at NYU-Tisch. Their collaborative investigations borrow from their multidisciplinary backgrounds, individual drawing practices, and specific costume and scenic design practices.

In the artists’ words: “The cards, vestiges from a project that may never happen, started as a repository for blazing recurring images, and quickly identified themselves as an independent oracular storytelling device through the simple act of arranging and rearranging. A tarot muse; we now exult the cards as agile performers in their own play, revealing new images and stories in an exercise of action and reaction.”

Concept & Creation | Camilla Dely & Tatiana Kahvegian
Performer & Video Editor | Tatiana Kahvegian
Clapping Music | Steve Reich
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

MOMENTS. FRAGMENTS. FRAGMENTED MOMENTS

Chelsea Selvan is a Johannesburg-based visual artist who spent Season 5 interning at The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

In the artist’s words: “My process of creation is often triggered through the recollection of memories – creating an intricate collage of the space, objects and moments that one engages with on a daily basis. During lockdown, my art making has gone through many moments: exploring ideas and thoughts, experimenting, stagnation, lack of inspiration, laziness and self doubt to a somewhat confident trust and flow. My natural instinct is to work in collage. Give me an old magazine or newspaper and my intuition takes over and I begin tearing up pieces and placing them carefully yet spontaneously with little thought but at the same time a lot of thought or, rather; a deep inner knowing of where the bits and pieces belong. I find this process is the only time when I am not thinking too much or analyzing and then over-analyzing everything around me. I sometimes envy those who seem to sail through life without considering and pulling everything to pieces. Yet, Socrates’ words about the unexamined life not being worth living are something I truly believe.

During lockdown I’ve been working with the concept of ‘things I see but rarely notice’ as a springboard to spark the beginning of my making – hence the chair in this collage. This time in lockdown has forced me to truly notice the so-called mundane objects we encounter but don’t fully see. I have taken snippets of words and sentences from my journaling and play with that in this stop motion as a way to hint at things I am feeling.”

Concept & Creation | Chelsea Selvan
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

SCULPTURE STILL LIFE

William Kentridge is a draughtsman, performer, and filmmaker, as well as the founder of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

This Long Minute, titled ‘Sculpture Still Life’ sees Kentridge further exploring drawing and sculpture in the studio, and putting drawings to work. Music for the piece is composed by Kyle Shepherd, a collaborator of both Kentridge and The Centre.

Concept & Performance | William Kentridge
Musician | Kyle Shepherd
Video Editor & Compositor | Žana Marović
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

DON’T STAND SO

Nicci Haynes is a visual artist based in Australia.

In the artist’s words: “As in ‘There and back’, my previous Long Minute video, 'Don’t stand so’ is informed by restricted access to resources and made from video footage printouts I had in my studio. I don’t exactly remember what my intentions were when the video was recorded, but it has configured itself into a commentary on COVID-19.”

Concept & Creation | Nicci Haynes
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

MOMMY MOMMY...

Thami Majela is an actor, dancer, and performing artist. ‘Mommy Mommy’ is a collaboration with Dattie Capelli, Cebolenkosi Zuma, and Tebogo Gxubane and is described as "A tale of the configuration of the young, subconscious voice: A digital collage of real life stories on manhood, sexuality, abuse, and authority."

Instructions for viewing from the artistic team:

"I remember being dragged naked down the street by my mother because I was found in the nearby field with boys in a makeshift shack at six in the evening. The humiliation. I was beaten and told it was wrong. From that day on I was wrong to myself in every way. I'm finally free now and it's beautiful.

"I loved taking walks, for hours. And randomly, I'd approach and ask: 'would you like to... have sex?’ The men were a lot older than me, but they didn't bat an eye when I said I was 13.

"I was 16 years old, she asked me to come over. I really liked her. Actually, I was in love, and I thought she loved me too. I wasn't really ready to have sex. I told her we can't, we don't have protection. She whipped it out of her dictionary. She said she'd teach me, and if I really loved her this would make her happy. I knew I wasn't ready, but I did anyway. It wasn't what I expected. It didn't feel good – for so long I made up for that feeling."

NAKULE NGXOKOLO

Asanda Hanabe is a dancer, theatre-maker, musician, and performing artist working across screen and stage who has collaborated on Season 7 of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

History, auxiliary narratives, and the act of prayer are some of Hanabe’s areas of interest. Here we see the artist singing ‘Nakule Ngxokolo’, a song she uses as a means of comfort in hard times.

Concept & Creation | Asanda Hanabe
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

PAUSE

Deborah Leiser-Moore is a performance maker, performer, lecturer, and director whose bold, highly visual and physical works use multiple theatrical languages to investigate culture and contemporary issues.

Leiser-Moore made this work during the first Australian lockdown and in response to what we so often take for granted. The minute captures what is now an all too familiar mood that comes with the conditions of physical distancing. The result is a poetic and surprising work revealing a discordant combination of monotony and the unknown.

Concept & Creation | Deborah Leiser-Moore
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

DELUSIONAL NATURE

Irene Ros is a theatre director and performance practitioner whose work has been constantly inspired by politics, gender equality, and the media.

‘Delusional Nature’ is a reflection on the detached relationship developed with physical reality during the lockdown. At the same time, it is a “home-specific" work, an attempt to squeeze creativity out of a domestic space.

Music for this Long Minute is by Lucas Jordan, a flutist and composer committed to innovative projects that aim to reconnect music with society.

Ros and Jordan started their collaboration in 2018, working on ‘God Save the Tea’, an immersive-contemporary opera exploring modern slavery drawing on the aesthetics of colonialism. Brought together by a joint investigation on the results of globalisation on people and places, they later collaborated on the interdisciplinary performance ‘The Invisible Cities Project’ with a group of artists coming from different backgrounds (performance, puppetry, classical music). The group is composed of five nationalities from two continents. The work is born of the shared experience found through improvisation and investigation into each other’s culture and history.

Concept & Creation | Irene Ros
Musician | Lucas Jordan
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

COFFEE SHOP

Ross Culverwell is a Johannesburg-based artist whose work typically explores personal narratives and histories.

In the artist’s words: “I started this video last year. I was looking for authentic moments in time and to represent the people in those moments. These moments can be easily forgotten, unnoticed or taken for granted. Capturing the moments gives me a glimpse into the spaces, lives and situations of the people in them, and I focus on their movements as they come and go. Using charcoal and animation helps me explore the concept because I am continually drawing and erasing whilst moving forward. Interestingly, I felt this first idea from last year fell flat, but now within the current crisis I have noticed a new possibility and meaning, I feel a deep nostalgia for this kind of atmosphere and moment which is at once deeply familiar but also so suddenly from another time.”

Concept & Creation | Ross Culverwell
Sound Designer | Zain Vally
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

REPEATED BUT DIFFERENT

José Luis Vicario is a sculptor, poet, and researcher at the University of Granada, Spain. Vicario took part in Series 1 of The Long Minute with his piece ‘A Taste of Spring’.

In the artist’s words: “Each shout, each bell, each bang, each summer, and each flower may be distinct, but they are all similar. We find the variation in things that are repeated. This work deals with forms and how the passage of time may alter our emotional reactions to them.

I present all the changes necessary in a construction in order to reach a definitive result. It continues to change with each viewing: Repeated, but different. The mouth of the performer was able to serve for singing, eating, kissing, or as a container for a wild flower cut along the road. The actor is faced with the abstraction of a form. The circles of the polka dots are ornaments, notes, or holes. The images show intentions and possibilities. The sketches are silhouettes of his tongue or of a song or of a vase, while his mouth continues being the mouth of the vase that expresses a lament.”

Concept & Creation | José Luis Vicario
Performer | Jon Charnas
Sound | Dereck van Bulcke & José Luis Vicario
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

SKINS

Daniella Turbin is a UK-based visual artist.

In the artist’s words: “Since the start of the lockdown I have been working from a loft space in my family home in Walsall, UK. In an attempt to visualise the gravity of the pandemic I set to work on a durational installation. On a daily basis, I made clay orange skins, each one representing the growing figures released of people losing their lives to the coronavirus within the UK. Responding to the numbers released generated a fluid and unpredictable process for me. The loft space is now filled with these clay pieces, they began as carefully crafted individuals but quickly had to turn into swiftly made sketches of form. Within a day or so, the sun dries out the clay and turns it white. To capture these changes in the pieces, I made a daily photo diary and took one photograph every twenty minutes from sunrise to sunset. Some of these photographs are shown here.”

Concept & Curation | Daniella Turbin
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

THE VANISHING POINT

William Kentridge is a draughtsman, performer, filmmaker, and founder of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

‘The Vanishing Point’ is a miniature minute journey of Kentridge’s continued thoughts and drawings in notebooks about life in the studio and the relationship between physical making and thinking.

Concept & Creation | William Kentridge
Video Editor & Compositor | Žana Marović
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

BARZAKH

Frederico Pratas is a Portuguese visual artist as well as a resident artist at MART in Lisbon.

This Long Minute is one of three by the artist.

In Pratas’ words: “My practice is painting, during confinement I created a series of slow motion videos in which I have appropriated works of well-known painters, Von Stuck, Renoir, Moreau, Matisse, Friedrich, Manet, Waterhouse, Courbet, Cranach the Elder to name a few. I then mixed these paintings with photographs of my authorship. The end result is a different thing, although the painted human figures are recognisable – the landscapes are not. The overall results are “new paintings” in motion. I am not a musician and do not play an instrument, except very deficiently, a guitar. For these I created, composed and actually played the sound through an app called GarageBand. Making these videos has created a way of thinking through painting, a side activity which feeds me and my processes.

“Ibn 'Arabi defines Barzakh as the intermediate realm or ‘isthmus’. It is between the World of Corporeal Bodies and the World of Spirits, and is a means of contact between the two worlds. Without it, there would be no contact between the two and both would cease to exist. It is described as simple and luminous, like the World of Spirits, but also able to take on many different forms just like the World of Corporeal Bodies can. In broader terms Barzakh 'is anything that separates two things’. It has been described as the dream world in which the dreamer is in both life and death. – Definition taken from Wikipedia.”

Concept & Creation | Frederico Pratas
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

METAMORPHOSIS

Frederico Pratas is a Portuguese visual artist as well as a resident artist at MART in Lisbon.

This Long Minute is the second of three by the artist.

In Pratas’ words: “My practice is painting, during confinement I created a series of slow motion videos in which I have appropriated works of well-known painters, Von Stuck, Renoir, Moreau, Matisse, Friedrich, Manet, Waterhouse, Courbet, Cranach the Elder to name a few. I then mixed these paintings with photographs of my authorship. The end result is a different thing, although the painted human figures are recognisable – the landscapes are not. The overall results are “new paintings” in motion. I am not a musician and do not play an instrument, except very deficiently, a guitar. For these I created, composed and actually played the sound through an app called GarageBand. Making these videos has created a way of thinking through painting, a side activity which feeds me and my processes.

“’Metamorphosis’ is a new story about initiation. The feminine figure was taken from a Cranach the Elder painting, the landscapes are indecipherable combinations of photographs taken by Pratas and paintings from Courbet and Constable.”

Concept & Creation | Frederico Pratas
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

SUBMUNDO

Frederico Pratas is a Portuguese visual artist as well as a resident artist at MART in Lisbon.

This Long Minute is the last of a series of three by the artist.

In Pratas’ words: “My practice is painting, during confinement I created a series of slow motion videos in which I have appropriated works of well-known painters, Von Stuck, Renoir, Moreau, Matisse, Friedrich, Manet, Waterhouse, Courbet, Cranach the Elder to name a few. I then mixed these paintings with photographs of my authorship. The end result is a different thing, although the painted human figures are recognisable – the landscapes are not. The overall results are “new paintings” in motion. I am not a musician and do not play an instrument, except very deficiently, a guitar. For these I created, composed and actually played the sound through an app called GarageBand. Making these videos has created a way of thinking through painting, a side activity which feeds me and my processes.

“[The previous] Long Minute was called ‘Metamorphosis’, and is a new story about initiation. This minute is called ‘Submundo’ (Underworld). According to mythology, Hades, god of the Underworld, fell in love with the beautiful Persephone when he saw her picking flowers one day in a meadow. The god then carried her off in his chariot to live with him in the dark Underworld.

Pratas has taken the human figures from paintings of Von Stuck and Renoir. The animals he collected from the social networks and from medieval authors whose names he couldn’t identify and the landscapes were created by blending his photographs in photoshop.”

Concept & Creation | Frederico Pratas
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

THE MORTAR MAKER SYMPHONY

Micca Manganye and Volley Nchabeleng are Johannesburg-based musicians and percussionists.

Both artists are interested in the relationship between work and play. In this collaborative ‘Long Minute’ we witness an ordinary activity become a ritual act and the potential seeds for a longer percussive piece.

THE DIFFICULTY OF DESCRIBING THE NATURE OF REALITY

Oliver Barstow is a designer, editor, and book publisher in the visual arts sector.

In Barstow’s words: “This work came from a recent dream about the pencil trick, the one where, by holding a pencil between thumb and index finger and shaking it up and down, it appears to bend, a solid rendered suddenly flexible. The dream came with a readymade sentence, or title of sorts attached to it: 'the difficulty in describing the nature of reality'. At the time, I was reading a book about the relationship between mind and matter by the philosopher Jefferey J. Kripal, so I guess this somehow triggered the dream and its associated text. A few weeks later, during the lockdown, I set about trying to remake the pencil trick, but in doing so, substituting the hand with a pendulum mechanism. In reading about pendulums, I learnt that the period – the time it takes to describe its arc – depends on the length of the pendulum. Interested in this variable, one pencil and pendulum became a set of four, each pencil sharpened to a different length. The making itself introduced further variables or 'imperfections' into the system – the difficulty in attaching the pendulum mechanisms to one another, the difficulty in joining the pencils to the pendulum arms, the difficulty in hanging the whole thing on the wall, and so on. As it works, none of the arcs or periods described by the pencils is consistent or accurate. As these variables cause them to speed up or slow down, at some points they are in unison to one another, at others in opposition. Their movement is complex, uncertain and almost impossible to describe.”

Concept & Creation | Oliver Barstow
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

IZANDLA EZINGCOLILEYO

Inga Somdyala is a visual artist based in Cape Town, South Africa. Departing from his isiXhosa cultural identity, Somdyala explores aspects of the cultural, political, and social negotiations of the post-apartheid generation.

In the artist’s words: “Izandla Ezingcolileyo (ACT II) is part of a project titled ILIZWE LIFILE, in which I engaged my own relationship with 'formal' education and how the generally eurocentric cultural inscriptions in the education institution tend to exclude or suppress African culture or knowledge systems through things like language. In this video and within my practice, my use of chalk and red ochre is to evoke the cultural, social, and spiritual residue of the colonial and apartheid past in the present day South African black experience.

The title for my body of work ILIZWE LIFILE directly translates into 'The Nation is Dead'; it was a declaration used by amaXhosa to mean that a state of war exists in the land. This is drawn from my research into the nine Frontier Wars, and is the point of departure for what I argue is an essentially cultural conflict that permeates social and political institutions in the post-apartheid landscape.”

Concept & Creation | Inga Somdyala
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

SPEED 78

Sue Fox and Gabriella Blumberg are artists and filmmakers. The mother and daughter duo explore how patterns of art meet patterns of music – sometimes in harmony and every so often in discord.

CONGREGATION

Ben Stanwix is a visual artist based in Cape Town, South Africa.

Stanwix contributed to the first Series of the Long Minute earlier this year with ‘WHAT NO ONE KNEW YESTERDAY’, a reflective minute on the restrictions of daily life, particularly at the moment of lockdown. Today’s piece resonates with humour. We see studio objects paying homage to a stack of books, which then dissolves into a wonderful parade and dance of literature.

Concept & Creation | Ben Stanwix
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

TABLE RAT

William Kentridge is a draughtsman, performer, filmmaker, and founder of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

This Long Minute is the first of three recent miniature films by the artist. In this piece we see the making of paper rats. The question William asked himself is “What is the minimum requirement for transforming crumpled paper into a believable rat?”

Concept & Creation | William Kentridge
Musician | Kyle Shepherd
Video Editor & Compositor | Žana Marović
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

PIANO RAT

William Kentridge is a draughtsman, performer, filmmaker, and founder of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

This is the second Long Minute in the ‘paper-rat series’ by Kentridge. The making of paper rats came after hearing news reports from Livingstone Hospital in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Designated as the main Covid-19 hospital in the district, reports had doctors and nurses describing the scenes as ‘war like’ and showing images of rats feeding on medical waste.

After finding the minimum requirement for transforming paper into a believable rat, Kentridge went on to collaborate with musician and pianist Kyle Shepherd in the finding of this music. After having the rats ‘play’ compositions by Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti, Shepherd went on to compose this music specifically for the rats.

Concept & Creation | William Kentridge
Musician | Kyle Shepherd
Video Editor & Compositor | Žana Marović
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

PICNIC PANIC

William Kentridge is a draughtsman, performer, filmmaker, and founder of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

This is the third and final ‘paper-rat’ Long Minute from a newly created series by Kentridge.

Here, we see the omens of plague engage in an intimate little post-crisis picnic. For a picnic blanket the rats unravel newspapers with headlines that call for solidarity, better forecasts and a plan for the future.

Concept & Creation | William Kentridge
Video Editor & Compositor | Žana Marović
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

OR ELSE THE MACHINE WILL BREATHE

Nhlanhla Mahlangu is a vocalist, composer, theatre-maker, dancer, educator, and creative collaborator at the Centre for the Less Good Idea.

‘Or Else the Machine Will Breathe’ sees the combining of footage and images taken while in hospital earlier this year after contracting COVID-19, with music composed during Season 2 of The Centre in 2017. ’Enyangeni’, was a central performance created, composed and choreographed by Mahlangu which went on to be performed in Amsterdam at the Holland Festival in 2019.

The music is performed by vocalists Xolisile Bongwana, Thabang Mkhwanazi, Simphiwe Bonongo, Sbusiso Shozi, Penwell Langa, Gregory K. Mabusela, Lulu Mlangeni, Teresa Phuti Mojela and Thandazile Sonia Radebe and comes out of workshops in which children’s games and playground rhymes were developed and build into more complex compositions.

A loose translation of the lyrics: “I am the shoe, I am the shoe, everybody steps on me, look now, now I am old, now I am worn out, I look like this, I look like this, I look like this…

Hey you! Mama Themba, who beats you up? Is it that man! Call him to come here! Oh no, I am scared! Take the horse! No I am scared! Oh the bones are going down, the bones are going up…”

Concept & Creation | Nhlanhla Mahlangu
Vocalists | Xolisile Bongwana, Thabang Mkhwanazi, Simphiwe Bonongo, Sbusiso Shozi, Penwell Langa, Gregory K. Mabusela, Lulu Mlangeni, Teresa Phuti Mojela and Thandazile Sonia Radebe
Video Editor | Noah Cohen
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

2 HANDS

Boryana Petkova is a visual artist based in Paris, France.

In Petkova’s words: “This work is about the distance between each of us. I use the drawing to connect different spaces, people and ideas. In this video two people, far away from one another, make one drawing.

Two hands from different people draw two halves of a graphite disc on offset walls. The drawers are in different spaces but draw at the same time and with the same movement and momentum. The gestures are strange, both hesitant and determined. When the hands withdraw, they reveal two halves of a black circle, although far away from one another the form is a single and unique shape.

The video ends with the phrase: ‘seeing suppose the distance, the way of seeing is a kind of touch, to see is a contact from a distance’”

Concept & Creation | Boryana Petkova
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

MICROBES

Christine Alicino and Ursula Brookbank are US-based visual artists interested in collaborative practice. This is the first of two Long Minute pieces from the duo.

In the artists words: “Many moons ago, before Instagram, we were transmitting single images from our distant cities of New York and Seattle without looking at the images of the other. We named our practice (IS) Instereo, a signal from two different channels mixed together. Our collaboration billowed into numerous annual happenings and occurrences of multi layered projections of figures, objects, fragments and flickers. We have always worked independently as well as together with the available environment, sound and material; brown paper, cloth, castoffs, and ourselves. This 52 second fragment is from a set of fourteen sequences exploring our microbial behaviour simultaneously captured during the pandemic. The microbe developed from our troll persona, we have also inhabited boxers, hermits, bricklayers and travelling tinkers.”

Concept & Creation | Christine Alicino & Ursula Brookbank
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

SHELTERS

Christine Alicino and Ursula Brookbank are US-based visual artists interested in collaborative practice. This is the second of two Long Minute pieces from the duo.

In the artist’s words: “Many moons ago, before Instagram, Christine Alicino and Ursula Brookbank were transmitting single images from our distant cities without looking at the images of the other. We named our practice (IS) Instereo, a signal from two different channels mixed together. Our collaboration, billowed into numerous annual happenings and occurrences of multi layered projections of figures, objects, fragments and flickers. We have always worked independently as well as together with the available environment, sound and material; brown paper, cloth, castoffs, and ourselves. This 52 second fragment is from a set of twelve sequences exploring our hermit behavior simultaneously captured during the pandemic. We have also inhabited the character traits of trolls, microbes, bricklayers and tinkers.”

Concept & Creation | Christine Alicino & Ursula Brookbank
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

ALL OF THE GONE | PICK UP STICKS BLACK

Sue Pam-Grant is an actor, writer, and interdisciplinary artist. Dan Selsick is a sessional trombonist and composer for film and television who also runs his own recording studio. Both artists are regular collaborators of both William Kentridge and the Centre for the Less Good Idea.

‘All of the Gone | Pick up Sticks Black’ is a collaborative Long Minute between Selsick and Pam-Grant.

Some words from Pam-Grant:

“Living Inside the Unprecedented
It is The Artist that is Affected
The Artist must Re-evaluate
The Artist must Respond
The Artist must Recalibrate
The Artist must Reconfigure
The Artist must Recalculate
The Artist must Reformat
The Artist must Move Forward
The Artist must Reimagine
The Artist is the Archivist
We will always turn towards the Artist to try to Make Sense
We will always look towards The Artist when we are Unable to See
The Artist must continue To Make in order to continue To Breathe”

ALL OF THE GONE PART 2 | SKIN

Sue Pam-Grant is an actor, writer, and interdisciplinary artist. Dan Selsick is a sessional trombonist and composer for film and television who also runs his own recording studio. Both artists are regular collaborators of both William Kentridge and the Centre for the Less Good Idea.

‘All of the Gone Part 2 | Skin’ is the second collaborative Long Minute by the two artists.

Some words from Pam-Grant:

“Living Inside the Unprecedented
It is The Artist that is Affected
The Artist must Re-evaluate
The Artist must Respond
The Artist must Recalibrate
The Artist must Reconfigure
The Artist must Recalculate
The Artist must Reformat
The Artist must Move Forward
The Artist must Reimagine
The Artist is the Archivist
We will always turn towards the Artist to try to Make Sense
We will always look towards The Artist when we are Unable to See
The Artist must continue To Make in order to continue To Breathe”

Creators | Sue Pam-Grant and Dan Selsick
Artwork Concept & Performance | Sue Pam-Grant
Composer | Dan Selsick
Musicians | Dan Selsick (trombone), Kevin Davidson (saxophone) & Adrian Levi (bass)
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

RECOVERY OF THE LAND IS NOT A MUSEUM

NOMASMETAFORAS is a collective project based in Bogotá, Colombia by artist Julian Dupont and philosopher Clara Melniczuk.

This Long Minute is an endeavor to reflect upon the context of contemporary art practice in relation to decolonial performativity.

In the words of NOMASMETAFORAS: “The collective works on the hybrid spaces between contemporary art and experimental thought from a decolonial perspective. Having exhausted the Western multiculturalist approach validated by identity-politics, we are knitting a conversation focused on the emancipatory matrix of 'the return to Earth by the Modern subject' with Indigenous thought as primordial construction of our ontological anarchism.”

Concept & Creation | NOMASMETAFORAS | Julian Dupont & Clara Melniczuk
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

WHAT FALLING FEELS LIKE

What Falling Feels Like’ is an adaptation of a longer film by artists Joe Young, Nicola Pilkington, Jade Delmage and Geoffrey Diver.

In Young’s words: “Two men live alone together on the edge of the world, overlooking the sea. There's no one around for miles – just the birds. This is a story of obsession, depression, and an albatross.”

Originally written for the stage in 2016 by Joe Young, ‘What Falling Feels Like’ is a reimagining of the world and story for screen. With the aid of Nicola Pilkington (producer/editor), Jade Delmage (illustrator), and Geoffrey Diver (soundtrack) the world of Samuel and Benjamin is brought to life with a new kind of lyricism. With over 1000 frames painted over two months of lockdown, and across two continents, Delmage’s images help create a world in which anything is possible – including a man falling in love with an albatross.

The original full film was the winner of a bronze ovation award at the inaugural vNAF.

GIRL ON A BICYCLE

Dan Selsick is a sessional trombonist, composer for film and television, and frequent collaborator of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

‘Girl on a Bicycle’ sees Selsick collaborating with artist and videographer Michael Jaspan, and musicians Waldo Alexander (solo violin), Peter Jaspan (Oboe), and Peter Sklair (Fretless bass).

Composer & Producer | Dan Selsick
Artist & Videographer | Michael Jaspan
Musicians | Waldo Alexander, Peter Jaspan & Peter Sklair
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

BEHIND THE SCENES

Meghan Judge is a multimedia artist, a Mellon Doctoral Fellow, and co-founder of the Africa|Nosy Art Exchange (ANAE).

This reflective Long Minute by Judge is titled ‘Behind the Scenes’.

In Judge’s words: “In this piece, I am revitalising old work by adding new sounds. Instead of the usual process of categorisation and extraction that manipulates the moving image into some kind of perfection, I am allowing the flickering mood of the imperfections within this piece to carry an atmosphere and tale of their own. What emerges for me is a thickening of the self, which lies within the layered intimacies and violences that come with facing the old to become anew.”

Concept & Creation | Meghan Judge
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

POSSESSION I

Aideen Barry is an Irish visual artist.

This Long Minute is part of a tryptic of 1 minute works extracted out of a larger piece titled ‘Possession’. It is performative film work in which we see a protagonist manifest bizarre and odd behaviour from the confinement of domestic life. Barry is simultaneously performer and director and has created a cacophony of slapstick humour and antidepressant comedy as her protagonist manifests the extraordinary out of the mundanity of domestic confined life. There is a Beckett-ian nod to the work of Barry, a "I can't go on, I'll go on" that drives this 6min30sec original moving image work which was made in 2011 but by 2020, within the context of the current pandemic, takes on renewed meaning and significance.

In Barry’s words: “The work ‘Possession’ was conceived in 2011 following the massive economic collapse that engulfed Ireland. Suddenly that word, Possession, seems to be such a heavy, loaded word. People were suddenly "possessed" by abject horror at the state of our economic and social reality, houses were becoming re-possessed by vulture funds and people were finding themselves living in half-finished mass housing estates all over the country suddenly in negative equity. The words "ghost-estates" were banded about as a way to describe how the mass housing boom had really not been considered with over a quarter a million houses in various states of build now facing the reality that they would never be lived in. To me, these seemed like the most haunted of all houses, never truly to have ghosts in them. It was hard not to conjure up quotes of Poe's "The Fall of the house of Usher". Of course I too was possessed when making this film, as I tried to be both in front of and behind the camera simultaneously and the shots required me to push myself into an extraordinarily uncomfortable position to get the perfect split second shot of abject humour just right.

A further backdrop to all this carnage was the place that the role of women were enshrined too. Within our constitution Article 41.2.3 ascribes "A woman's place is in the Home". This proclamation has led to the subjugation of women in numerous forms of gendered objectiveness. I embrace the Beckett-ian black humour that I use as a kind of crowbar to activate conversations that are often too dark to tackle straight on: inequality, gender issues, class constructs.”

Concept & Creation | Aideen Barry
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

POSSESSION II

Aideen Barry is an Irish visual artist.

This Long Minute is part of a tryptic of 1 minute works extracted out of a larger piece titled ‘Possession’. It is performative film work in which we see a protagonist manifest bizarre and odd behaviour from the confinement of domestic life. Barry is simultaneously performer and director and has created a cacophony of slapstick humour and antidepressant comedy as her protagonist manifests the extraordinary out of the mundanity of domestic confined life. There is a Beckett-ian nod to the work of Barry, a "I can't go on, I'll go on" that drives this 6min30sec original moving image work which was made in 2011 but by 2020, within the context of the current pandemic, takes on renewed meaning and significance.

In Barry’s words: “The work ‘Possession’ was conceived in 2011 following the massive economic collapse that engulfed Ireland. Suddenly that word, Possession, seems to be such a heavy, loaded word. People were suddenly "possessed" by abject horror at the state of our economic and social reality, houses were becoming re-possessed by vulture funds and people were finding themselves living in half-finished mass housing estates all over the country suddenly in negative equity. The words "ghost-estates" were banded about as a way to describe how the mass housing boom had really not been considered with over a quarter a million houses in various states of build now facing the reality that they would never be lived in. To me, these seemed like the most haunted of all houses, never truly to have ghosts in them. It was hard not to conjure up quotes of Poe's "The Fall of the house of Usher". Of course I too was possessed when making this film, as I tried to be both in front of and behind the camera simultaneously and the shots required me to push myself into an extraordinarily uncomfortable position to get the perfect split second shot of abject humour just right.

A further backdrop to all this carnage was the place that the role of women were enshrined too. Within our constitution Article 41.2.3 ascribes "A woman's place is in the Home". This proclamation has led to the subjugation of women in numerous forms of gendered objectiveness. I embrace the Beckett-ian black humour that I use as a kind of crowbar to activate conversations that are often too dark to tackle straight on: inequality, gender issues, class constructs.”

Concept & Creation | Aideen Barry
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

POSSESSION III

Aideen Barry is an Irish visual artist.

This Long Minute is the third and final 1-minute work extracted out of a larger piece titled ‘Possession’. It is performative film work in which we see a protagonist manifest bizarre and odd behaviour from the confinement of domestic life. Barry is simultaneously performer and director and has created a cacophony of slapstick humour and antidepressant comedy as her protagonist manifests the extraordinary out of the mundanity of domestic confined life. There is a Beckett-ian nod to the work of Barry, a "I can't go on, I'll go on" that drives this 6min30sec original moving image work which was made in 2011 but by 2020, within the context of the current pandemic, takes on renewed meaning and significance.

In Barry’s words: “The work ‘Possession’ was conceived in 2011 following the massive economic collapse that engulfed Ireland. Suddenly that word, Possession, seems to be such a heavy, loaded word. People were suddenly "possessed" by abject horror at the state of our economic and social reality, houses were becoming re-possessed by vulture funds and people were finding themselves living in half-finished mass housing estates all over the country suddenly in negative equity. The words "ghost-estates" were banded about as a way to describe how the mass housing boom had really not been considered with over a quarter a million houses in various states of build now facing the reality that they would never be lived in. To me, these seemed like the most haunted of all houses, never truly to have ghosts in them. It was hard not to conjure up quotes of Poe's "The Fall of the house of Usher". Of course I too was possessed when making this film, as I tried to be both in front of and behind the camera simultaneously and the shots required me to push myself into an extraordinarily uncomfortable position to get the perfect split second shot of abject humour just right.

A further backdrop to all this carnage was the place that the role of women were enshrined too. Within our constitution Article 41.2.3 ascribes "A woman's place is in the Home". This proclamation has led to the subjugation of women in numerous forms of gendered objectiveness. I embrace the Beckett-ian black humour that I use as a kind of crowbar to activate conversations that are often too dark to tackle straight on: inequality, gender issues, class constructs.”

Concept & Creation | Aideen Barry
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

UNTERTAGÜBERBAU

Nikolaus Gansterer is an artist living and working in Vienna, Austria.

This Long Minute is an excerpt from Gansterer’s ‘Untertagueberbau’. The original work stages a three channel video installation which combines elements of animated film, cartoon films, live drawings, performance, and studio work.

This excerpt gives a strong sense of Gansterer’s ongoing research into performative live drawing, animation video practice and his attempts to find yet a new language for these subtle and somatic thought processes. This particular sequence is based on a sentence by philosopher & biologist Francisco Varelea as it addresses the entanglement between self - world - organisms.

In the artist’s words: ‘Since the pandemic I feel the immanent fabric between matter, life, time and mind has becomes even more tangible than before”

Concept & Creation | Nikolaus Gansterer
Sound | Martin Siewert
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

OLEIFICIO: A COLOUR PALETTE, OR, AN EASY ESCAPE

Alessandro Gueli is a multi-disciplinary artist who specialises in film and photography and is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Film and Television studies at the University of Cape Town. Before this, he spent two years studying in Florence, Italy.

‘Oleificio: A colour palette, or, and easy escape’ is an unexpected combination of the melancholic and mundane, with found sound adding a strong musical quality.

In the artist’s words: “The bulk of my film work has recently centred itself around the culture and people of Sicily, where my father and his family come from. Oleificio was filmed on an iPhone at an olive oil distillery (in Italian, oleificio) in a small village on the island, Santa Elisabetta. It conveys the peculiar sadness I experienced on the night of my visit there – the hue of the green walls, the noise, the emptiness – I felt I had to capture it. The final clips are taken from my bus journey early the next morning, over the brittle landscape of the Sicilian countryside. The sound is made up of recordings taken at the distillery, as well as from around the village.”

Concept & Creation | Alessandro Gueli
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

RUSH HOUR

Gerard Bester is the Creative Director of the Hillbrow Theatre Project, where he works to inspire inner-city children and youth to engage with the world in new and exciting ways. His practise explores the post-modern, anti-hero, and naïve clown.

Bester has worked with The Centre for the Less Good Idea since Season 2 where he both directed an iteration of Nhlanhla Mahlangu’s seminal work ‘Chant’ and was associate director alongside Mahlangu for ‘Enyangeni’, a piece which travelled to The Holland Festival in 2019 with other key works made at The Centre.

Here, Bester shares an early Long Minute reflection that explores themes of yearning and dreaming amongst other things.

Concept, Video & Narration | Gerard Bester
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

STRUGGLE FOR A GOOD HEART

William Kentridge is a draughtsman, performer, and filmmaker, as well as the founder of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

This Long Minute, titled ‘Struggle for a Good Heart’, reminds us of the expansion and contraction of time in the studio. Kentridge often says the studio is a space into which the world can enter, be taken apart, worked on, and sent back out.

Concept & Creation | William Kentridge
Video Editor & Compositor | Žana Marović
Music | John Cage’s ‘Works for Prepared Piano’
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

HOUSEBOAT WARMING

Lynn Koek is the senior producer for The Office, a performing arts and film production company based in New York and London. The Office is producer of William Kentridge’s ‘The Head & the Load’ (Tate Modern London, Ruhrtriennale, Park Avenue Armory 2018, Holland Festival 2019) and ‘Waiting for the Sybil’, a companion piece to the Alexander Calder opera ‘Work in Progress’ (Rome Opera, 2019). She is also director’s assistant to Kentridge during productions and is based in Amsterdam.

Koek recently moved into a houseboat, and this spontaneous canal performance by Reinier Sijpkens, a known character in the city, felt like a fortuitous housewarming gift. Sijpkens has designed a miniature church organ to fit into his tiny boat, and he regularly takes the boat out and plays in public.

Video | Lynn Koek
Musician | Reinier Sijpkens
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

TAKING ONE’S CHANCES

William Kentridge is a draughtsman, performer, and filmmaker, as well as the founder of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

In ‘Taking One’s Chances’, we see Kentridge playing an extended and curious game of ‘rock, paper, scissors’ against his notebook. The notebook and its animated ability to be both the proverbial drawing board and the completed work is a recurring motif in many forms of William’s work and, indeed in his daily life, it would be odd to see him without one in hand.

Concept & Creation | William Kentridge
Video Editor & Compositor | Žana Marović
Music | Track 03 Les Indes galantes, RCT 44_ Musette (Arr. I. Friedman Transcriptions for Piano)
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

WHO IS FIRE, WHO IS WATER

William Kentridge is a draughtsman, performer, filmmaker, and founder of The Centre for the Less Good Idea,

Launching Series 2 of The Long Minute is a playful and experimental studio piece from Kentridge titled ‘Who is Fire, Who is Water’.

Concept & Creation | William Kentridge
Cinematographer | Chris-Waldo de Wet
Music | Symphony no. 10 in E min, Op. 93 Andante Allegro. Dimitri Shostakovich, played by WDR Sinfonieorchester in 1996
Video Editor & Compositor | Janus Fouché
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

DRAWING THE HOUSE WITHOUT WINDOWS

Odette Graskie is a Johannesburg-based who works with paper and drawing.

This process seeks to be about human interaction and connection and, for Graskie, drawing is a way of seeing – she is interested in highlighting the intimate moments she so often notices.

In the artist’s words: “The words that I read are excerpts from The House Without Windows by Barbara Newhall Follett. The book is about a girl who runs away to live in the wild, the life of the authors had eerie parallels as she wrote this when she was 12 and at 25 she disappeared (sadly probably a victim of domestic violence). But the book is pure magic.”

Concept & Creation | Odette Graskie
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

THUS SPOKE THE SEDUCER

Chris Soal is a Johannesburg-based visual artist and former collaborator of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

In the artist’s words: “The video's title is a nod to both The Seducer’s Diary by Kierkegaard, and to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In my body of work with toothpicks I’ve often framed the material anthropomorphically by highlighting the relationship between the singular toothpick and the plural, mirroring that of the individual and the communal, and thus bringing the individual (the viewer) into a direct relationship with the material and its ecological and philosophical implications. Through this particular title, the singular toothpick again enters into the metaphorical, suggestive of the individual in day to day existence and the struggle for meaning.

“While drawing on these references this could also be seen as a meditation on the artistic process itself: the hopeful insanity of the repeated gesture (the daily work in the studio) which offers no guaranteed formulaic success, and the often painful dance/wrestle with materials and ideas against the backdrop of the 'left brain’ critic.

“In this Long Minute, the critic voices ‘I will not be seduced by the medium’, reminding one of the punitive lines written over and over by a naughty child in detention. However while the voice is unrelenting, the action is continuous, suggesting that maybe the only way out is through, and that there might be a little bit of magic (or clever editing) to be enjoyed along the way.”

Concept & Creation | Chris Soal
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

LIGHT

Mathews Rantsoma is a Johannesburg-based actor, writer, and director.

Rantsoma was an invited artist for Season 7 of The Centre for the Less Good Idea which saw him exploring the themes of childhood, spirituality, and magical realism through Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri’s The Famished Road.

Concept & Creation | Mathews Rantsoma
Curator of the Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

MOBILE

Lisl Ponger is an artist living and working in Vienna, Austria.

Ponger’s body of work concerns stereotypes, racism, and the construction of the gaze. It is located at the interface between art, art history, and ethnology in the mediums of photography, film, installation, and text.

Over the course of 2020 Ponger also curated an online film festival on https://hundredheroines.org/ – a weekly programme of films made by, or about, women.

Concept & Creation | Lisl Ponger
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

CRUSHED

Ranjini Chatterjee is a visual artist and a graphic designer practising in Kolkata, India.

In the artist’s words: “My experimental video is about the rise of domestic abuse worldwide and especially in India due to families being forced to spend more time together during the COVID-19 lockdowns. The darkness created by conflicts and abuse by family members who once promised love, protection and hopes – reduced to nothing but crumbled fear, grief and anger. India has recorded a nearly 60 percent rise in domestic abuse on women and children. It is a pattern playing out around the world. Helpline numbers buzz with distressing calls showing us clearly just how intense psychological as well as physical mistreatment can get when people are kept 24 hours a day together within a reduced space. This quarantine has triggered off intimate terrorism of basic human rights, robbed them of their self-esteem and hopes. The background noises of cars and regular day noises stand witness to the fact that abuse happens in broad daylight in every form and at times right in front of our eyes.”

Concept & Creation | Ranjini Chatterjee
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

BAPTISIM

Oliver Mayhew is a Johannesburg-based artist.

The location of the Johannesburg TRC Amnesty hearings was held in the Wesley Hall of the Central Methodist Church. In a series of works, Mayhew is actively recording and documenting all of the Church's structural damage as he aims to restore the structural integrity that the Church is devoted to upholding through its history of safeguarding the lives and dignity of the vulnerable.

After many years of use, the artist’s familial plate has been kept clean and the artist draws attention to this fact. Bringing the plate to a space that it hasn’t been before so as to begin a dialogue between the artist’s desire to come clean and the plate that is still clean.”

In Mayhew’s words: “The Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg was actively opposed to the dehumanising policies of the apartheid state as they provided shelter to activists who were fleeing from the security police. In post-apartheid, the Church became a safe haven for refugees seeking refuge during the Xenophobic attacks in South Africa.”

Concept & Creation | Oliver Mayhew
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace

ENTR’ACTE WITH THE FAIRIES

Bongile Lecoge-Zulu is an actor, writer, flautist, and performing artist.

Lecoge-Zulu has participated in a number of Seasons at the Centre for the Less Good Idea as well as collaborated as a lead artist and co-curator of Season 8.

In the artist’s words: “I’ve been drifting off with the fairies a lot lately. Especially during Zoom meetings. And these are the thoughts I think and the faces I pull – I've seen them myself. And as you know one thought leads to the next and the next... and frankly I love it there. I enjoy the ride down the rabbit hole and could spend hours in wonderland; a temporary forever that transports you to places only an absent mind can dwell.”

Concept & Creation | Bongile Lecoge-Zulu
Videographer & Editor | Zama Jolobe
Music | 'Entr'acte' by Bizet (Arranged and performed by Bongile Lecoge-Zulu)
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace