William Kentridge
"Only by failing can I find good ideas"
by Rodolfo Di Giammarco – la Repubblica
William Kentridge, born in Johannesburg in 1955, is a visual artist and theatre director acclaimed for his productions that blend animated film, drawing, performance and music. “I don’t seek to celebrate anything, but rather to bring together contradictions, struggles and desires,” he explains.
After works such as Refuse the Hour and The Head & the Load, he returns to the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto with The Great Yes, The Great No, which explores the European condition and the experience of doubt. Kentridge has long viewed history as a landscape of shadows, of apartheid and of conflict, “of what remains in a place after official history has passed.”
The new project consists of drawings, films, live narration and music and is, in his words, “an invitation to step into thought, into reflection, into the moment before certainties take shape.”
Mr. Kentridge, in your design for Spoleto, the faces of men and women include black and white features, a predatory bird and a coffee pot. What do they represent?
“They are outlines of cardboard masks used in our performance, and more broadly symbols of surrealism, with types drawn from historical characters. They are diverse fragments—any singular identity of the world is impossible.”
In Spoleto you are presenting The Great Yes, The Great No. How is this work constructed between theatre, oratorio and chamber opera?
“I combine impulses. I use a chorus of female singers and silhouettes and puppets. As I assembled voices and images, I encountered the story of a journey from Marseille to Martinique. The language of the stage met the theme of migration and contemporary colonialism. There are three exoduses: the escape of refugees in 1941 from Vichy France; the earlier transatlantic voyages, with Joséphine Bonaparte aboard, in which Africans were transported to the Americas to be enslaved on plantations; and the journeys of today’s migrants who risk crossing the seas in search of a better world, even at the cost of encountering worse forms of welcome.”
In your exhibition Self Portrait as a Coffeepot, the puppets evoked the Russian Revolution and Stalinist repression. What is your view on the war between Russia and Ukraine?
“Even before the Soviet Union, there were deep currents of authoritarianism in Russia: they have resurfaced, and today they echo the strong governments of the United States testing the limits of their own autocracy.”
How should we understand your statement ‘I like digital tools but prefer the fountain pen’?
“It has to do with my age. As a student, we typed on typewriters, then computers arrived. But I have never truly ‘thought’ by tapping keys. I know that almost every writer creates using a keyboard. I don’t refuse to do it, but I choose to write by hand, with my fountain pen. The ink spreads across the page, and that contact helps my process of invention. I enjoy the illegibility of the first handwriting.”
What relationship do you see between text and drawing, word and image, message and art? In your 40-metre video installation More Sweetly Play the Dance, you showed how dancing can exorcise death.
“I tend to fragment the world and recompose it, testing whether it responds to certain questions. Someone once told me that Alban Berg’s Lulu, which I was working on, could be seen as a danse macabre, and I began researching the unending dance of the medieval figures of Fians Ffolbein, who danced in defiance of death.”
If drawings are an extension of memory, what is your idea of Artificial Intelligence?
“After decades and centuries of human effort to give meaning to the world, we are now pursued by technologies that move at the speed of light. I don’t know whether an algorithm will ever replace humanity. The dangers will come from bad actors—criminals or states—who may manipulate things.”
In 2016 you inscribed your frieze Triumphs and Laments, a project of ‘erasing the patina of time’, along 550 metres of the banks of the Tiber, knowing that Romulus and Remus, Mastroianni and Pasolini would eventually be washed away by the weather. Is art always this provisional?
“It can survive for centuries, or be very vulnerable. Some sculptures can be blown up easily, as has happened. In Rome, a city I love, the grime and bacteria on the travertine quickly swallowed the figures again. I knew it was an ephemeral project.”
We know you admire Italo Svevo. Is he the only one with ‘absolute values’?
“It was astonishing that Zeno’s Conscience, written in 1923, contained what I myself felt at eighteen: the resemblance between two peripheral cities like Trieste and Johannesburg, and the self-irony about the impossibility of quitting smoking...”
You’ve said your sketchbooks contain many thoughts. Could you share a few of them?
“At 20, I had a mantra that denied I was an artist—a faculty I attributed only to those living in a Paris or New York attic. Later, I realised that good ideas also grow on the margins, out of failures, so much so that I founded in Johannesburg the Centre for the Less Good Idea, for uncertain apprentices. Sometimes my table is covered with phrases, clippings and silhouettes aspiring to become characters in a play. In my own way, I too am a practitioner.”