‘There’s Something to be Said’ is by Johannesburg-based writer, editor, and arts journalist David Mann.

The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s ‘writer on the wall’ - witness to much of the processes, workshops and incubators - as artists make sense of their ideas and impulses through action. Dave Mann holds the seemingly impossible task of finding concreter words for the flowing action in the room.

It has been wonderful to watch Dave take ‘his’ moment in the foreground. To see his personal process of observation, recollection and description of the Centre’s goings on, translate into a Poetry Minute. One which also speaks true to his interest in alternative modes of producing and publishing text-based work, particularly within the public realm.

Through Dave’s tactile engagement with his text and tools of writing; we become privy to the cycle of drafting and editing, the weighing of words, and the invasive peripheral thoughts that interrupt a writer’s process.

Dave Mann elaborates by saying: “‘There is Something to be Said’ looks at the act of writing in response to an artwork, performance, or event, and the subsequent tensions and navigations of language, memory, knowledge, doubt, and certainty that emerge through the process. These tensions find resonance in the tearing of the page, line by line, in a search for better words, as well as the disruption of the narrative through periphery or secondary thought – a tussle between writer and editor, or artist and critic”.

THERE IS SOMETHING TO BE SAID
Created by | David Mann
Cinematography and Editing by | Noah Cohen
Sound Recording by | Zain Vally

A Poetry Minute is curated by Bongile Gorata Lecoge-Zulu